Long life and good health don’t always go hand in hand.
A gene that lengthens nematode worms’ lives and is necessary for reproduction also makes the worms more susceptible to infection and stress, researchers report July 17 in Nature Communications. That’s unusual; longevity-promoting genes generally help organisms deal with stress, says Arjumand Ghazi, a geneticist who studies aging at the University of Pittsburgh.
Ghazi and colleagues had previously found that a gene called TCER-1 increases life span and is needed for Caenorhabditis elegans worms to produce eggs and healthy offspring. She and colleagues expected that deleting the gene would make the worms prone to infections. Instead, worms missing TCER-1 fought off a bacterial infection for nearly twice as long as worms with an intact gene, says Francis Amrit, a molecular biologist in Ghazi’s lab. “When I first saw that, I thought I’d made a mistake,” Amrit says.