A team of researchers taking tissue samples from bats captured for study and subsequently released. Credit: Juan Manuel Vazquez
The secret to a long life may lie in the genomes of the longest-lived mammals for their size: bats. That idea captivated Juan Manuel Vazquez when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, but at the time he couldn't find any good published information on bat genomes to provide clues. Once he became a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow in 2020, however, he unleashed his passion and began scouring the Western U.S. for bat species that could provide tissue samples and DNA to sequence.
Enlisting the help of Berkeley undergraduates, he traveled around the West, erecting mist nets over streams, ponds and rivers at night to capture, biopsy and release as many bat species as he could. He focused on those in the genus Myotis, which contains the bat with the longest life span—a Brandt's myotis, Myotis brandtii. One individual was banded in Europe and recaptured 50 years later.
In a new paper appearing this week in the journal Nature, Vazquez and colleagues report the first analysis of eight Myotis genomes and the discovery of a close link between the bats' longevity and their immune systems—longer-lived bats had higher levels of cancer-fighting genes.
