Rockfish DNA may hold the secrets to a longer life, according to a study published yesterday (January 11) in Science Advances. Some rockfish species can live to be 200 years old, making them some of the longest-living animals on Earth. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital combed through nearly two dozen rockfish (genus Sebates) genomes, finding genes associated with increased longevity. These genes, the researchers found, are also correlated with increased human longevity, and could one day help researchers better understand or even prevent age-related diseases.
“It’s a cool study,” says Peter Sudmant, an evolutionary geneticist at University of California, Berkeley who was not involved in the study. “It’s exciting to see groups working in these remarkable species that have these extreme, crazy lifespans.”
Study coauthor Stephen Treaster, a postdoc at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital, has always been interested in why certain species, like humans and ...
