Commensal relationships between insects and their microbiota have been little studied and are not well understood.  However, recent studies have suggested that there are more of these relationships than previously thought.
Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust, is known to exploit the production of common metabolites by its indigenous gut flora (Charnley et al., 2000). One such [...]

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Steve Austad’s paper in Journal of Comparative Pathology (PubMed), Methusaleh’s Zoo: How Nature provides us with Clues for Extending Human Health Span, promotes the idea that “exceptionally long-lived organisms have important roles to play in our future understanding of the causal mechanisms and modulation of ageing.” Austad writes that most of what is known about [...]

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Scientists from Université de Rennes use an usual organism for their research, the sub-Antarctic wingless fly, Anatalanta aptera. This fly is interesting because it has a long imaginal life thus offering a good model to study evolution and senescence. A study recently published in Biology Letters showed that contrary to expectation older flies recovered better [...]

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The new gene discovered in mouse (Mus musculus), Rps23r1, decrease levels of toxic proteins that are linked to the formation plaques and tangles in the brains of Alzheimers disease patients. Published today in Neuron and the result of a worldwide collaboration of seven institutions, the research identifies the new gene and demonstrates how it reduces [...]

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A recent paper by Christina Dagmar Buesching and colleagues demonstrate two different endocrinological phenotypes in  wild European badgers, Meles meles. Type 1 males lower their testosterone levels after the end of the main mating season in winter, thus presumably saving energy and maintaining good body condition and low [...]

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Gregory Blomquist uses patterns of physical traits and genetic correlations to try to determine if there is a trade-off between early reproduction and survival in his recent paper in Biology Letters. By studying rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, he saw a strong positive correlation for the trade-off, indicating antagonistic pleiotropy. First formulated by George Williams, antagonistic [...]

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The journal Developmental Neurobiology recently published an article linking age-related patterns of task performance in the ant, Pheidole dentata, with an increase in serotonergic cell bodies in the optic lobes of worker ants. Serotonin is modulator of insect behavior. The increase in serotonin in several neural tissues appears to be related to the type of [...]

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By studying red-toothed shrews (family Soricidae), some of the shortest lived mammals (~18 months), researchers in the Department of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston have shown that age-related muscle senescence does occur in wild animals with short lifespans. The two species chosen for the studies, the semi-aquatic water shrew, Sorex palustris, and [...]

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