First Analysis of Eight Myotis Bat Genomes Links Longevity to Antiviral and Cancer-Suppressing Immunity
核心洞察
A Nature study presents the first genomic analysis of eight Myotis bat species, linking longer lifespans to stronger immune defense and cancer (搜索)-suppressing gene activity.
Cells from the little brown bat responded to lethal chemical damage by activating cell-death genes rather than DNA repair, mirroring the elephant's anti-cancer (搜索) strategy.
Researchers found far more overlap than expected by chance between genes associated with bat longevity and genes involved in bat-virus interactions.
A genomic comparison of eight bat species in the genus Myotis has linked longer lifespans to stronger immune defense and cancer (搜索) suppression, offering what researchers describe as a natural library of solutions to human diseases of aging. The study, published in Nature on 26 August 2026, is the first analysis of eight Myotis genomes and was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
The work began with a puzzle that fascinated Juan Manuel Vazquez during his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, when too few high-quality bat genomes existed to explain why some species age so slowly. After joining UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow in 2020, he traveled across the Western U.S. with Berkeley undergraduates, setting mist nets over streams, ponds and rivers at night to capture bats, collect small wing biopsy samples and release the animals. The team focused on Myotis, a genus of about 139 species among the 1,511 known bat species.
Longevity Tracks With Immune and Cancer-Suppressing Genes
Comparing the genomes, the researchers found that longer-lived bats had higher levels of genes associated with fighting cancer (搜索), pointing to a strong connection between lifespan and immune function. The results suggest longevity may depend in part on an immune system that remains highly effective against both infectious organisms and cancer. The team also found substantial overlap between genes associated with aging and genes involved in disease defense.
"Bats evolved to live for a long time without getting diseases, which suggests that we don't necessarily need to look at diseases of aging and diseases of infection as completely separate fields," Vazquez said. "We can look at these bats and try to understand how, in the same way you can improve your immune system to fight off viruses, maybe you can improve your immune system so it doesn't decline in old age. Or maybe bats can help us find ways to fight off tumors so our immune system doesn't get tired, and that can also help us deal with other stresses of life and not exhaust our immunity."
The findings address a larger evolutionary mystery sometimes called Peto's paradox: animals with more cells and longer lives should in theory accumulate more cancer (搜索)-causing mutations, yet species such as bats, whales and elephants have evolved defenses that prevent their size or longevity from producing the expected surge in cancer.
Damaged Bat Cells Prioritize Self-Destruction Over Repair
As part of the study, Vazquez grew cells collected from bat wing biopsies in the laboratory — he currently maintains cell cultures from 259 individuals representing 32 species — and exposed them to toxic chemicals to assess their response to severe damage.
The longest-lived bat in his sample, the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus (搜索)), reacted unexpectedly. Instead of switching on genes that produce DNA repair proteins, the cells increased activity of genes that promote cell death.
"We found the literal opposite of what we expected if you treat the bats with a lethal dose of this chemical," Vazquez said. "The longest-lived bat in North America decides 'I can't save this ship' and immediately switches gears to prioritize killing off the cells that are damaged. The elephant, another cancer (搜索)-resistant species that is long-lived, has the exact same strategy — if you can't save the cell, kill the cell."
That cellular self-destruction, known as apoptosis, is one of the body's main safeguards against cancer (搜索): a damaged cell that continues dividing can pass mutations to its descendants, while a cell that destroys itself removes the threat before a tumor can develop. The result suggests animals may have evolved very different strategies for preventing damaged cells from becoming dangerous.
"By looking across the diversity of life and the remarkable longevities of different species, we hope we can better understand the interplay between DNA damage and the immune system to enable us to have full and healthy life spans," said Peter Sudmant, a Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology who studies the genetics of aging and lifespan.
"If you start looking at long-lived species like elephants, whales and bats, you start finding ways that nature has actually already resolved a lot of these problems in human health," Vazquez added.
Closely Related Species, Dramatically Different Lifespans
Bats have been remarkably successful since appearing about 60 million years ago, now accounting for 20% of all mammal species and occupying habitats on every continent except Antarctica. Within Myotis, closely related species diverge sharply in lifespan: Brandt's myotis (Myotis brandtii (搜索)) can survive for half a century — one individual banded in Europe was recaptured 50 years later — while the black myotis (Myotis nigricans (搜索)) of South and Central America lives only about seven years. Vazquez compared the contrast to a hypothetical situation in which Homo neanderthalensis lived nine times longer than modern Homo sapiens.
Because close relatives share much of their biology, differences in lifespan are easier to connect with specific genes, immune pathways or cellular responses than in comparisons between distantly related animals. The demands of flight may have helped shape these defenses: flying requires an enormous, sustained release of energy that can expose cells to metabolic stress, and Vazquez likens a bat's nightly hunt for insects to running several ultramarathons every day.
Bats also carry immune systems that appear unusually active, allowing them to host an extraordinary variety of viruses while controlling damaging inflammation and living with persistent viral infections without becoming sick. Some of those viruses, including viruses related to the cause of COVID-19 (搜索), can spill over into humans.
"Bats have evolved this incredible fitness capacity, this incredible ability to deal with disease and this incredible ability to be able to prevent cancer (搜索)," Vazquez said. "That means that, by understanding how bats have evolved to do all these things that other mammals haven't, we can find completely new and unexpected ways of dealing with the normal things that cause human diseases."
Longevity Genes Double as Viral Defense Genes
The genomic analysis revealed another connection: whenever Vazquez identified a gene associated with bat lifespan, collaborator Elise Lauterbur, then at the University of Arizona, had often identified the same gene as involved in interactions between bats and viruses.
"There is way more overlap than you would expect just by random chance between the genes that are associated with longevity and genes that are associated with viral interactions," Vazquez said.
The researchers also found that Myotis bats possess an unusually large number of genes producing proteins that interact with DNA viruses, such as herpesviruses (搜索), which carry their genetic information in DNA. Those proteins can either assist viral infection or help protect the animal; one protective function involves increasing production of interferon, an antiviral signaling protein that helps coordinate immune defenses.
"DNA viral interacting proteins were strongly enriched for selection in bats in contrast to most other mammals, where there is a very strong enrichment for selection for both DNA and RNA viral interacting proteins," Sudmant said.
Humans and other primates show a different pattern, tending to have more genes producing proteins that interact with RNA viruses, including HIV (搜索) and the virus that causes COVID-19 (搜索), than with DNA viruses. That evolutionary mismatch could help explain why some viruses that move from bats into people cause serious zoonotic disease.
"Humans and bats are badly suited to each other," Vazquez said. "That is one of the reasons why we have to be careful working with bats — it's a two-way street for zoonoses. We don't want to give the bat something and we don't want to get something from the bat. That mismatch is definitely something we should look into more."
Ongoing Work on Immune Trade-Offs and DNA Repair
Vazquez, now a faculty member at Pennsylvania State University, is continuing to investigate the genetic mechanisms that control longevity using cultured bat cells. Sudmant is focusing on how those cells regulate immune responses, including the trade-off between producing proteins that attack viral genomes and protecting the host's own genome from those same proteins.
"One thing that I'm really excited about is the trade-off between how a bat protects itself by producing proteins that attack the genomes of viruses but also protects its own genome from being attacked by those proteins," Sudmant said. A defense powerful enough to destroy viral genetic material can also threaten the host's genome if not precisely controlled; understanding how bats manage that risk may reveal strategies for preserving immune strength without accelerating cellular damage. Sudmant also maintains cell cultures from numerous primate species to investigate the genetics of longevity and the relationship between lifespan and DNA repair genes.
In addition to Vazquez, Sudmant and Lauterbur — now at the University of Vermont — co-authors include Lucie Etienne of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and David Enard of the University of Arizona in Tucson.