UMass Chan Medical School Faculty Publications
UMMS Affiliation
Program in Molecular Medicine; Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology
Publication Date
2020-07-28
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Biochemical Phenomena, Metabolism, and Nutrition | Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Genetics and Genomics
Abstract
Long-lived rodents have become an attractive model for the studies on aging. To understand evolutionary paths to long life, we prepare chromosome-level genome assemblies of the two longest-lived rodents, Canadian beaver (Castor canadensis) and naked mole rat (NMR, Heterocephalus glaber), which were scaffolded with in vitro proximity ligation and chromosome conformation capture data and complemented with long-read sequencing. Our comparative genomic analyses reveal that amino acid substitutions at "disease-causing" sites are widespread in the rodent genomes and that identical substitutions in long-lived rodents are associated with common adaptive phenotypes, e.g., enhanced resistance to DNA damage and cellular stress. By employing a newly developed substitution model and likelihood ratio test, we find that energy and fatty acid metabolism pathways are enriched for signals of positive selection in both long-lived rodents. Thus, the high-quality genome resource of long-lived rodents can assist in the discovery of genetic factors that control longevity and adaptive evolution.
Keywords
aging, beaver, chromosome-level assembly, evolutionary analyses, gene expression, genome, long-lived rodents, longevity, naked mole rat, stress resistance
Rights and Permissions
Copyright 2020 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
DOI of Published Version
10.1016/j.celrep.2020.107949
Source
Zhou X, Dou Q, Fan G, Zhang Q, Sanderford M, Kaya A, Johnson J, Karlsson EK, Tian X, Mikhalchenko A, Kumar S, Seluanov A, Zhang ZD, Gorbunova V, Liu X, Gladyshev VN. Beaver and Naked Mole Rat Genomes Reveal Common Paths to Longevity. Cell Rep. 2020 Jul 28;32(4):107949. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.107949. PMID: 32726638. Link to article on publisher's site
Related Resources
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Cell reports
PubMed ID
32726638
Repository Citation
Zhou X, Karlsson EK, Gladyshev VN. (2020). Beaver and Naked Mole Rat Genomes Reveal Common Paths to Longevity. UMass Chan Medical School Faculty Publications. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2020.107949. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/faculty_pubs/1786
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Biochemical Phenomena, Metabolism, and Nutrition Commons, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Commons, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons, Genetics and Genomics Commons
Comments
Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.