Is Autophagy the Key to the Longevity of Bats?
For their size and metabolism, bats are remarkably long-lived. Autophagy — removing damaged cell components — might be how they do it.
Large and slow (mostly)
To become able to slow down the age-related decline in various bodily functions, a first step is to understand the many intertwined processes that underlie aging.
We can study healthy centenarians. If we find that most of these hale hundred-year-olds share, for example, gene variants, lifestyle factors, or physiological traits (for example, their methionine metabolism), we may have found a solid lead for further investigations into the aging process and how to tweak it.
We can also study animals. But which animals would be good colleagues to unravel the aging process(es)?
One finding that can guide us here is that, on average, across species, body size tends to correlate with lifespan. The bigger you are, the longer you live — for several reasons, including a (relatively) slower metabolism, genetic protection against age-related conditions, better cancer resistance, and so on. Interestingly, within species this seems to be the reverse, smaller is better.
