What if you were told there was a completely natural way to stop your body from aging? The trick: You’d have to hibernate from September to May each year.
That’s what a team of biologists from UCLA, uOttawa and the University of Haifa in Israel studying yellow-bellied marmots discovered. These large ground squirrels are able to virtually halt the aging process during the seven to eight months they spend hibernating in their underground burrows, the researchers report today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
This process, the researchers said, helps explain why the average life span of a yellow-bellied marmot is longer than would be expected from its body weight.
Hibernation, an evolutionary adaptation that allows animals to survive in harsh seasonal environments where there is no food and temperatures are very low, is common among smaller mammals, like marmots, native to the mountainous western regions of the U.S. and Canada.
There may be biomedical advantages to inducing hibernation conditions in humans or human cells, the researchers said — to preserve organs for transplantation, for example, or as part of long-term space missions.
The research in Julien Martin, Associate Professor, faculty of Science’s laboratory focuses on the importance of evolutionary processes in shaping current wild population of animals and how current environmental conditions are influencing the evolution of wild animals.
“The study reveals an unusual and exciting pattern in our understanding of the mechanisms of aging and opens many exciting avenues of research in both human health and evolutionary ecology,” said Dr. Martin.
Full study available here: Hibernation slows epigenetic ageing in yellow-bellied marmots
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