Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Maximum lifespan varies widely among mammals, but the genomic basis of this variation remains incompletely understood. We used body-mass-corrected longevity and a phylogenetically informed phenotype-shift framework to compare 126 primate species, selecting seven long-lived and six short-lived species for convergent amino-acid substitution analysis. Stringent pooling across species identified 1,068 recurrent phenotype-associated positions in 934 genes. These genes showed significant agreement with mammal-wide longevity candidates, with 226 genes shared compared with 120 expected by chance (1.88-fold enrichment; P = 1.16 × 10 −22 ). Functional analysis detected 17 significant terms, with the strongest coherent signal involving male infertility and decreased male fertility. Our results show that focused primate sampling recovers a non-random component of the broader mammalian longevity signal and point to male reproductive biology as a promising direction for investigating the evolution of lifespan.
Institutions: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, Institut Pere Mata, Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental, Institut de Recerca Biomèdica Catalunya Sud, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Pasqual Maragall Foundation, Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center, Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Centre for Genomic Regulation
Language: English
Subfield: Aging
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212159361