Abstract
Annual fishes of the genus Nothobranchius inhabit ephemeral habitats in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. Their life cycle is characterized by very rapid maturation, a posthatch lifespan of a few weeks to months and embryonic diapause to survive the dry season. The species N. furzeri holds the record of the fastest-maturing vertebrate and of the vertebrate with the shortest captive lifespan and is emerging as model organism in biomedical research, evolutionary biology, and developmental biology. Extensive characterization of age-related phenotypes in the laboratory and of ecology, distribution, and demography in the wild are available. Species/populations from habitats differing in precipitation intensity show parallel evolution of lifespan and age-related traits that conform to the classical theories on aging. Genome sequencing and the establishment of CRISPR/Cas9 techniques made this species particularly attractive to investigate the effects genetic and non-genetic intervention on lifespan and aging-related phenotypes. At the same time, annual fishes are a very interesting subject for comparative approaches, including genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. The N. furzeri community is highly diverse and rapidly expanding and organizes a biannual meeting.
Highlights
Annual fishes of the genus Nothobranchius inhabit ephemeral habitats in Eastern and Southeastern Africa
Natural habitat and life cycle During the Monsoon season, many regions of the African Savannah are characterized by the formation of scattered ephemeral water pans of varying size, from a few square meters up to the extension of a small lake
A notorious inhabitant of these ponds is the long-lived African lungfish (Protopterus annectens), which can survive the dry seasons thanks to its primitive lung and to its ability to enter in a state of quiescence
Summary
Aging phenotypes The interest in Nothobranchius and N. furzeri was sparked by the extreme short lifespan of this species, across the fields of aging, evolutionary, and developmental biology [3, 17–19]. 2c, d, 3f ) [47], and (iii) in multiple species from Southern Mozambique, population-scale differences in the progression of aging traits can be measured [11] This allows to investigate genetic architecture of natural lifespan evolution by mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in populations with diverging phenotypes [48] and aging traits [48, 49]. It was demonstrated that evolution of short lifespan in annual killifishes is connected to generalized and massive genome-wide relaxation of negative selection that affects 37% of the protein-coding genes and results in the accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations [32]. Both relaxed selection and positive selection preferentially affected genes important for mitochondrial energy production [32]. N. furzeri has been used to test the effects of a number of pollutants [54, 55]
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