Unlocking telomere effects on life, death and fitness in a warming world
Description: 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.
Funder: Australian Research Council
Amount: A$504,500
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Discovery Projects
Start date: 2022-01-01
End date: 2026-10-31
Investigator: Erik Wapstra
Institution: University of Tasmania
Subfield: Physiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Funded outputs count: 0
Funder award ID: DP220102928
OpenAlex ID: G730307080