Disposable Soma Theory and the Evolution of Maternal Effects on Ageing.

Joost Van Den Heuvel,Tobias Uller,Sinead English

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145544

Joost Van Den Heuvel, Tobias Uller + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0145544

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jan 11, 2016
Citations: 22	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Newcastle University, University of Oxford, Lund University

Abstract

Maternal effects are ubiquitous in nature and affect a wide range of offspring phenotypes. Recent research suggests that maternal effects also contribute to ageing, but the theoretical basis for these observations is poorly understood. Here we develop a simple model to derive expectations for (i) if maternal effects on ageing evolve; (ii) the strength of maternal effects on ageing relative to direct environmental effects; and (iii) the predicted relationships between environmental quality, maternal age and offspring lifespan. Our model is based on the disposable soma theory of ageing, and the key assumption is thus that mothers trade off their own somatic maintenance against investment in offspring. This trade-off affects the biological age of offspring at birth in terms of accumulated damage, as indicated by biomarkers such as oxidative stress or telomere length. We find that the optimal allocation between investment in maternal somatic investment and investment in offspring results in old mothers and mothers with low resource availability producing offspring with reduced life span. Furthermore, the effects are interactive, such that the strongest maternal age effects on offspring lifespan are found under low resource availability. These findings are broadly consistent with results from laboratory studies investigating the onset and rate of ageing and field studies examining maternal effects on ageing in the wild.

Highlights

Maternal effects describe a situation in which the phenotype of the mother has a causal effect on the phenotype of her offspring [1,2]
Biological age at birth was higher for offspring born from young mothers in low resource environments than for offspring born from young mothers in high resource environments, but this difference became gradually smaller for older mothers (Fig 1B)
The maternal age effect on the rate of ageing of offspring was evident under the evolutionary background condition, but this effect was very small for mothers with biological ages between 0 and 1200 and became apparent only when mothers had reached a high biological age (> 1600; Fig 2B)

Summary

Introduction

Maternal effects describe a situation in which the phenotype of the mother has a causal effect on the phenotype of her offspring [1,2]. We consider how maternal effects on offspring survival and lifespan evolve in response to environmental heterogeneity and how these depend on variation in resource availability and the age of the mother.

Results

Conclusion