AFP, published on Thursday 26 August 2021 at 07:11
Immortal vampires and bats. “Bram Stoker may have been right” in linking his famous eternally young Count Dracula to these flying mammals, smiles Emma Teeling, a geneticist who explores the exceptional longevity of bats in the hope of benefiting humans.
Because the much-maligned creature lives a long life by sparing itself the pangs of old age, while harboring the Ebola virus or coronaviruses without being sick.
As every year, the researcher from University College Dublin and her team collect blood samples and wing biopsies from large murines living in churches or schools in the West of France.
“This will allow us to have clues to understand how we can live longer in good health, how we can fight diseases”, enthuses the Irish scientist.
Bats live particularly long for such a small mammal.
In general “in nature, by looking at the size of an animal, we can predict its lifespan: small species live quickly, die young, like mice; large ones live slowly and long like the bowhead whale”, explains she told AFP.
“But bats are unique. They are among the smallest mammals, but they can live for an extraordinary length of time.”
Thus, the large murine which does not exceed 8 cm can live ten, even twenty years. And in 2005, researchers had captured in Siberia a Brandt murine banded 41 years earlier, ten times longer than expected for its size.
“Bats seem to use mechanisms that slow down aging,” explains Emma Teeling. So much so that it is impossible to know how old an animal is once it is an adult.
So to get to the bottom of it, the Dublin team relies on the program of the NGO Bretagne Vivante, which since 2010 has been implanting a transponder on young great murines from several colonies.
These chips make it possible to know the age of each individual recaptured over the years, in order to then analyze the various “biomarkers” of aging in the blood collected.
First, the telomeres, small pieces of DNA located at the end of the chromosome, which shrink each time a cell replicates. But not in the great murine.
– “Everything ends up dying” –
“Their telomeres do not shrink with age. That means they can protect their DNA,” says Emma Teeling. “Over time, they even increase their ability to repair their DNA.”
Another line of research: these mammals, carriers of many viruses without being sick, “are capable of modulating their immune responses”.
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted that hyper-inflammatory runaway plays a key role in severe cases of this disease in humans. A “cytokine storm” that sets off in patients several days after the onset of symptoms.
Bats, for their part, “manage to balance the antiviral response and the anti-inflammatory response”: “if a human with a bat metabolism arrived at the hospital, he would not end up on a ventilator”.
In collaboration with other researchers around the world, the geneticist, who is leading a genome mapping project for 1,400 species of bats, is now trying to develop tools to be able to use the secrets of bats for humans.
It is not about “transgenic humans, or human bats”. “We must find the means to control the expression of our genes to obtain the same effect”, continues the researcher, who hopes to achieve medical applications within ten years, or even earlier.
For those who would then fantasize about immortality, Emma Teeling brings back to Earth. “Everything ends up dying,” she says.
“What bats have is not eternal youth. They cannot live forever but they can live longer in good health,” without cancer and diseases of old age.
Like the “super centenarians” still dashing until the very end of their lives, she explains, referring to the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calmant who died at 122 years old.
As Bram Stoker, who wrote his novel a few blocks from her home in Dublin, imagined, “maybe it’s all in the blood.” “We take some blood from bats, but instead of vampirizing them, we make them reveal their secrets.”
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