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.

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…

Scientists are studying the mechanisms behind bats' immune systems to uncover what they could teach about human longevity.