September 3rd, 2026
Long-lived bats are extreme outliers in the normal mammalian relationships between species body size, metabolic rate, and life span. They are small, have a high metabolic rate, and unlike near all other mammals with those characteristics, many bat species are long-lived. But bat species do exhibit a very wide range of life spans; near neighbor species can have very different paces of aging. Researchers here sequence the genomes of a number of different bat species in search of insight into the mechanisms driving longevity in bats. As is usually the case, the distant end goal of this sort of comparative biology of aging research is to find potential approaches to the development of longevity therapies. That is a long road, and little progress has been made beyond investigation. Only in recent years have the first speculative transfers of genes from long-lived species to short-lived species occurred, for example.
The genus Myotis is one of the largest clades of bats, and it exhibits some of the most extreme variation in lifespans among mammals, alongside unique adaptations to viral tolerance and immune defence. Here, to study the evolution of these phenotypes, we generated cell lines and near-complete genome assemblies for eight closely related Myotis species. Using genome-wide screens of positive selection, analyses of structural variation and functional experiments in primary cells, we identify patterns of adaptation contributing to longevity, cancer resistance, and viral interactions.
