Parental senescence effects and their mechanisms in a short-lived vertebrate

Senescence is one of the most studied phenomena of living organisms. We only begin to embrace senescence in its multiple dimensions and its influence on the next generations. The relationship between parental age and offspring performance is far from unequivocal. We are interested what is the evolutionary role of parental senescence effects and we want to understand the mechanisms of their transmission. We plan to test the parental senescence effects and identify routes for their transmission in a short-lived vertebrate without parental care. We propose an integrative approach that will compare chronological and biological age of the parents using longitudinally measured phenotype and cellular markers. We will then test parental senescence effects on offspring performance. We focus mainly on the transfer of negative effects through two cellular markers – telomeres and DNA methylation patterns. The proposed project can benefit from employing the thoroughly studied model organism (turquoise killifish) and will extend the research on senescence towards its inter-generational effects.