The African turquoise killifish: A research organism to study vertebrate aging and diapause

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Top Highlights

• new research organism in the aging field

• turquoise killifish, a vertebrate with a naturally compressed lifespan of only 4–6 months, fills an essential gap to understand aging.

• Understanding the diapause state could give new insights into strategies to prevent the damage caused by aging and to better preserve organs, tissues, and cells.

• compressed lifespan and a long-term resistant diapause state,

• exhibiting exceptional resistance to stress and to damages due to the passage of time.

• allows more systematic characterizations of the interplay between genetics and environment during vertebrate aging.

• Diapause and nondiapause embryos provide a set of potent experimental materials to gain insight into not only the regulation of diapause but also the changes in the aging process during and beyond diapause.

• In other documented examples of insects, individuals that have been through diapause significantly even outlive their counterparts that have never entered diapause (Tatar & Yin, 2001). Thus, the aging process appears to be slowed down or even suspended during diapause

• Thus, studying diapause could not only offer insight into the genetic network that regulates lifespan but also provide new ideas for prevention of damage accumulation or erasure of damage.

• Diapause can occur at different developmental stages in diverse species

• In killifishes, diapause can occur during early, intermediate, and late developmental stages (diapause I, II, and III, respectively;