Unlocking telomere effects on life, death and fitness in a warming world

在生物学中，很少有什么事情能像在生命早期就能预测成年人的死亡和致命疾病那样，激起人们如此强烈的理解欲望。连接早期生活压力、疾病、衰老和死亡时间的一个共同因素是端粒，即每条染色体末端的保护区。该项目的目的是明确地将自由生活的外温动物种群中的端粒动态与实验方法联系起来，以促进我们对父母和环境对后代端粒及其在以后生活中的影响的理解。该项目将利用世界上最长的关于外温动物对气候反应的数据集之一，提供关于端粒如何影响适应性和环境所起作用的新知识。

Few things in biology provoke such a strong desire for understanding as when adult death and fatal disease can be predicted early in life. A common factor linking early life stress, disease, ageing and time of death are telomeres, the protective regions at the end of each chromosome. This project aims to explicitly link telomere dynamics in free-living ectotherm populations with experimental approaches to advance our understanding of parental and environmental effects on offspring telomeres and their effects later in life. This project will take advantage of one of the world’s longest datasets on ectotherm responses to climate to provide new knowledge of how telomeres affect fitness and the role that the environment plays.