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Wednesday, September 09, 2026

Denisovan radius discovered for first time in Southwest China

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

image:
The geographical location of the Bianfu Cave and the morphology of the two human teeth and three newly discovered Denisovan bones.
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Credit: Image by IVPP

Scientists recently discovered various Denisovan remains in Southwest China dating back to the late Middle Pleistocene, including the first Denisovan radius—one of two long bones in the forearm.

Denisovans are a genetically identified archaic hominin group believed to have been widely distributed across Asia. However, due to the limited number of fossil remains, especially postcranial bones—those below the skull—a distribution gap has long existed in Southwest China. Therefore, little is known about the physical traits that allowed Denisovans to adapt to different environments.

In a new study, researchers employed a novel proteomic strategy to identify additional hominin bones from a Paleolithic site called Bianfu Cave in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Paleoproteomic analysis confirmed five hominin remains as Denisovans, helping fill the distribution gap of Denisovans in Southwest China.

According to the researchers, the discovery of the first Denisovan radius provides crucial insights into Denisovan postcranial phenotype.

The study, published in Nature on September 9, was conducted by a research team led by Professor FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with multiple institutions.

New Strategy

ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) has recently become an important tool for large-scale screening of hominin fossils due to its advantages of micro-invasive sampling, methodological simplicity, rapid identification, and low cost. However, the recovery rate of hominin fossils has been extremely low—only 0.1% at sites such as Denisova Cave and Baishiya Karst Cave. Given that Bianfu Cave yielded more than 60,000 bone fragments, conducting ZooMS analysis on all specimens would be both costly and inefficient.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers developed a novel “morphological pre-screening + ZooMS identification” strategy. This combined approach significantly improved screening efficiency and provided a replicable methodological framework for discovering hominin remains at similar Paleolithic sites with abundant bone fragments.

Through morphological pre-screening, the researchers selected 22 potential hominin remains from the large assemblage of bone fragments. Subsequent ZooMS analysis confirmed that two parietal bone fragments (BFD767 and BFD769) and one proximal radial fragment (BFD771) were derived from hominins.

Among the three newly identified hominin specimens, BFD767 and BFD771 originated from Layer 7, which also contained four hominin teeth. This layer was dated to approximately 148,000–134,000 years ago. BFD769 came from the older Layer 9, dated to approximately 167,000–150,000 years ago.

In addition to the three hominin bones, the research team also analyzed two hominin teeth excavated from Layer 7, including a lower fourth premolar (YHB3518) and a lower second molar (YHB3075).

To obtain comprehensive proteomic profiles of the five specimens, the team extracted and analyzed proteins from multiple fractions of different tissues, including bone, dentine, and enamel. Six to 16 endogenous proteins were identified from each specimen, covering 1,972 to 4,076 amino acid residues. Notably, abundant specific peptides from the amelogenin Y isoform were identified in the enamel of the two teeth, indicating that both teeth belonged to male individuals.

Population Assignment

To determine the population assignment of these hominin specimens, the research team systematically screened for single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) within the endogenous proteomes.

They found that all five samples carried the Denisovan-specific variant COL1A2 R996K, indicating their Denisovan identity. Three additional informative SAPs were identified in the enamel of two Bianfu Cave teeth: the Denisovan-related variant AMBN M273V; AMELY 179L, a variant shared by modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans; and AMBN 253A, a variant that distinguishes the Bianfu Cave individuals from Middle Pleistocene Homo erectus in East Asia.

Using the consensus sequences of endogenous proteins from each sample, the researchers constructed Bayesian phylogenetic trees with topologies highly consistent with those obtained from nuclear genome studies. The trees placed modern humans as the sister group to the Neanderthal-Denisovan clade. Each Bianfu Cave sample formed a monophyletic clade with Denisova 3, with a posterior probability of 100 percent. This result aligns with the SAP assignments, supporting the reliable attribution of these specimens as Denisovans.

Morphological Phenotype

Comprehensive morphological analysis was conducted on the two Denisovan parietal bones (BFD767 and BFD769) and one partial radius (BFD771). The cranial vault thickness pattern of Bianfu Cave hominins is most similar to that of H. heidelbergensis and East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo.

Notably, BFD771 is the only confirmed Denisovan radius to date. Although it has large proximal dimensions and a likely medially oriented radial tuberosity, similar to Neanderthal radii, its overall external shape and mid-neck cross-sectional geometry align more closely with modern humans. According to the researchers, the first identified Denisovan radius fragment is of exceptional importance. Its mosaic features indicate unique biomechanical demands and behavioral adaptations in Denisovans, differing from those inferred for Neanderthals and modern humans.

Based on their results, Bianfu Cave has the richest Denisovan fossil record currently known outside Denisova Cave. The study fills a critical geographical gap in the known distribution of Denisovans. The Denisovan remains were derived from two different stratigraphic layers dating to Marine Isotope Stage 6. During this glacial period, the relatively warmer climate and abundant food resources may have enabled the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau to serve as a favorable habitat for hominins and supported the long-term survival of the Bianfu Cave population.

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10976-9

Article Title

Ancient proteins identify various Denisovan remains from Southwest China

Article Publication Date

9-Sep-2026

Sunday, September 06, 2026

Sweet-stealing capitalists and the definition of kissing: The 2026 Ig Nobel award winners

By David Mouriquand

Published on 04/09/2026 - EURONEWS

The annual awards highlight strange, funny and thought-provoking research. This year's ceremony took place in Europe, with “fungi” as the theme of the 36th edition.

Nobel prize winners get prestige, a gold medal, and a little over a million dollars. Ig Nobel prize winners don’t get such sublime considerations.

They do get acclaim, but instead of all the Nobel perks, they are instead showered with paper planes and 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

The snag is that the currency cratered years ago, so 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars is worth next to nothing. Still, last year’s winners went home with a single packaged moist towelette, so swings and roundabouts... Plus, this year's winners were given a statuette representing a slab of blue cheese trampled on by a foot erupting with toadstools in honour of this year's “fungi” theme. What's not to love?

Established in 1991 as a satirical version of the Nobel prize, the Ig Nobels aim to promote public engagement with scientific (and culturally resonant) research, honouring “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think".

This year’s Igs were awarded yesterday at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland – a first, as the award ceremony is usually held in the US. The reason, the organisers say, comes down to the hostile climate in the US toward science, as well as international travellers being increasingly reluctant to travel Stateside.

A perfectly ordinary and not at all alarming English sentence.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of The Annals of Improbable Research magazine, told AP. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the US this year.”

Back to this year's research and winners, who have discovered that the upper classes are more prone to behaving badly, that kissing can be redefined and cockroaches will inherit the Earth in more ways that one.

Here's a look at some of this year’s winners:

Biomechanics: Evolutionary smooching

Winners: Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, Stuart West (UK, USA).

Rationale: "Devising a more precise definition of kissing – non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer" – in ants, polar bears, and humans.

Research: A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing. Dr Matilda Brindle and her colleagues developed a rigorous definition of kissing through the study of different species. They found that kissing occurs in most living large apes and likely in Neanderthals - arguing that early humans and Neanderthals may have even kissed one another. "Next time you kiss someone, you can think, 'This is a 21.5 million-year-old tradition that I'm honoring here,” said Dr Brindle. “It's not just a modern human behaviour. It's really ancestral. And to us, that suggests that it probably has quite a useful evolutionary function."

Economics: Rich people are the worst

Winners: Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner (USA, Mexico, Canada)

Rationale: "Amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to snatch from a children's candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behaviour."

Reasearch: Higher social class predicts increased unethical behaviour. The researchers amassed evidence through seven studies that prove rich people are just the worst. They’re more likely to take sweets from children, excel at lying when it comes to their scores during dice rolls, are more likely to cut other cars off at junctions, and view greed as a positive attribute. “The general pattern seems to be that with wealth and rising power, you become less engaged with the needs of others and less burdened by the needs of social relationships,” Piff said. “Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries but it’s emblematic of the tendency to prioritise one’s own needs over those of others.”

Turns out Dorothy Parker was right: “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

Chemistry: Cockroach milk, anyone?

Winners: Sanchari Banerjeee, Nathan Coussens, Francois-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Steven Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas, Sumabramanian Ramaswamy (India, France, Japan, USA).

Rationale: "Discovering that milk proteins from vivaporous cockroaches contains three times as much energy as milk proteins than from cows."

Research: Structure of heterogeneous, glycosylated, lipid-bound, in vivo-grown protein crystal at atomic resolution from the viviparous cockroach Diploptera punctata. If that sentence just gave you a headache, it boils down to the authors extracting milk crystals from the guts of Diploptera punctata roach embryos harvested from a brood sac to determine the protein structure of the crystals. Essentially, cockroach milk is powerful.

Physics: The optimization of urination

Winners: Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott, Kaveeshan Thurairajah (Canada, USA, China, Saudi Arabia).

Rationale: "Theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal."

Research: Splash-free urinals for global sustainability and accessibility. A team of students at the University of Waterloo in Canada worked out that urinal splash is almost entirely eradicated if the stream strikes the urinal at less than 30 degrees. They even designed a urinal whose shape ensures minimal splash regardless of the user’s aim. “I am very proud,” said Dr Zhao Pan. So he should be.

Medecine: Thrusting mucus

Winner: Takuji Unno (Japan).

Rationale: "How to Blow the Nose – An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing."

Research: Unno explored the cultural differences between Europeans and Japanese people when it comes to proper nose-blowing, quantifying the key aspects of the practice “to give good instructions to those who do not understand how to blow the nose.” He concluded that the faster the “expiratory thrust” of the blow, the more efficiently one can expel mucus. “A big and long nose blow is therefore recommended to prevent upper and lower respiratory tract diseases.”

Peace: The benefits of vicious friends

Winners: Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams, and Daniel Sznycer (USA, Argentina, Australia).

Rationale: "We value friends who are vicious to people we dislike."

Research: People have nuanced preferences for how they want their friends to behave toward them versus others. No one likes a friend who treats them poorly; but in a broader social context, the authors explored how dynamics shift when it comes to how people want their friends to behave toward their enemies. In those cases, some prefer their friends to be more vicious toward those people. “Sometimes we want our friends to be more vicious and indifferent when they interact with our enemies,” said Dr Jaimie Krems. “I’ve felt, in many instances, incredibly loved when people have carried my hate for me and been willing to have my back.”

Olfaction: Smelly children

Winners: Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel, and Agnieszka Sorokowska (Poland, Germany, Sweden).

Rationale: "Collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents but teenagers do not."

Research: "Babies Smell Wonderful to Their Parents, Teenagers Do Not: an Exploratory Questionnaire Study on Children’s Age and Personal Odor Ratings in a Polish Sample." Conclusion: Parents usually find their babies’ body odour very pleasant, as it activates reward centers in the brain. However, once puberty hits, it’s a different matter. Bloody hormones.

Elsewhere, other researchers landed prizes for turning mosquito proboscises into 3D printing nozzles, burying cotton underwear to monitor soil quality, and gently stepping on various parts of snakes to try to learn what induces a venomous snake to bite a human. They're more likely to bite during the day, in warmer climates, and if you trample their head. And before you ask, yes, they wore safety boots.

Next year’s Ig Nobel ceremony will be held in Antwerp, Flanders.

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Clues to longevity may reside in the genomes of long-lived bats

Scientists are finding that bat genes involved in viral interactions also play a role in longevity

University of California - Berkeley

Longeared bat — image:
This longeared bat, Myotis evotis, was captured in Arizona by researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona. The scientists took tissue samples from the wings before releasing it and used the samples to sequence the bat's genome and to establish cell cultures for study.
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Credit: Elise Lauterbur

The secret to a long life may lie in the genomes of the longest-lived mammals for their size: bats.

That idea captivated Juan Manuel Vazquez when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, but at the time he couldn’t find any good, published information on bat genomes to provide clues. Once he became a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow in 2020, however, he unleashed his passion and began scouring the Western U.S. for bat species that could provide tissue samples and DNA to sequence.

Enlisting the help of Berkeley undergraduates, he traveled around the West erecting mist nets over streams, ponds and rivers at night to capture, biopsy and release as many species of bats as he could. He focused on those in the genus Myotis, which contains the bat with the longest lifetime — a Brandt’s myotis, Myotis brandtii. One individual was banded in Europe and recaptured 50 years later.

In a new paper appearing this week in the journal Nature, Vazquez and colleagues report the first analysis of eight Myotis genomes and the discovery of a close link between the animal’s longevity and its immune system — longer-lived bats had higher levels of cancer-fighting genes.

The findings suggest that an immune system able to mount an overwhelming attack against infectious organisms and cancer may be integral to a long lifespan. The overlap between genes involved in aging and those involved in fighting disease also means that understanding one will help scientists understand the other.

“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.”

For the study, Vazquez cultured cells he biopsied from the wings of the bats. (He currently has cell cultures from 259 individuals representing 32 species.) When he treated cultured bat cells with toxic chemicals, he found an unusual response: for the longest-lived bat in his sample, the widespread little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), the toxin didn’t trigger activation of genes for DNA repair proteins, but rather up-regulated genes promoting cell death.

“We found the literal opposite of what we expected if you treat the bats with a lethal dose of this chemical,” he 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-resistant species that is long-lived, has the exact same strategy — if you can't save the cell, kill the cell.”

The discovery is a heads-up that clues to longevity can be gleaned from understanding the different ways animals deal with disease, said Peter Sudmant, a Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology who studies the genes involved in aging and longevity.

“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,” he said.

“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.

Longevity, an active lifestyle and an immune system on high alert

The bat lifestyle has been a big success since the group arose about 60 million years ago. Bats now comprise 20% of all mammalian species, live on all continents except Antarctica and occupy a wide range of ecological niches. Of the known 1,511 species, about 139 are in the Myotis genus, which is known for bats exhibiting an extreme range of lifespans. While Brandt’s myotis bats can live half a century, the black Myotis — Myotis nigricans, of South and Central America — lives a mere seven years. This is as if our close relative, Homo neanderthalensis, lived nine times longer than modern Homo sapiens, Vazquez said.

Despite bats’ evolutionary success, scientists were surprised to find that their immune systems are hyperactive, working overtime to suppress damaging inflammation from constant viral infections without actually becoming sick. As a result, healthy bats can host an amazing variety of viruses, some of which, like the cause of COVID-19, can spill over into human populations.

Some researchers have linked bats’ robust immune systems to their very active lifestyle. Vazquez likens bats’ nighttime patrols for bugs to running several ultramarathons every day.

“Bats have evolved this incredible fitness capacity, this incredible ability to deal with disease and this incredible ability to be able to prevent cancer,” he 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.”

The new study provides tantalizing clues. Vazquez found that whenever he identified a bat gene linked to lifespan, his collaborator, Elise Lauterbur, then at the University of Arizona, had identified the same gene as one involved in the bat’s interaction with 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,” he said.

Another surprise was that Myotis bats have an enhanced abundance of genes that make proteins that interact with DNA viruses — viruses, like herpes, that encode their genes using DNA. These proteins can either promote infection or protect against it, such as by boosting expression of the antiviral hormone interferon.

“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, on the other hand, tend to have more genes for proteins that interact with RNA viruses, like COVID and HIV, than DNA viruses.

This mismatch between bats and humans may be why viruses spilling over from bats into humans and causing zoonotic disease have wreaked such havoc in recent years.

“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.”

While Vazquez continues to investigate the genetic control of longevity in cell culture in his new faculty position at Pennsylvania State University, Sudmant is more interested in the immune responses of these cells.

“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,” he said.

He currently has cell cultures from many species of primate in which he is studying the genetic basis of longevity and how that’s related to DNA repair genes.

In addition to Vazquez, Sudmant and Lauterbur, now at the University of Vermont, other co-authors of the paper include Lucie Etienne of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and David Enard of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10932-7

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Insights into longevity and virus-driven adaptation from Myotis bat genomes

Article Publication Date

26-Aug-2026

Researchers taking tissue samples from bats captured for study and subsequently released.

Credit

Juan Manuel Vazquez

What if bats hold the secret to a long, healthy life?

New study in Nature reveals how bats evolved genes that drive longevity, immunity, and cancer resistance

University of Vermont

image:
Elise Lauterbur is an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Vermont and co-lead author of the study.
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Credit: Joshua Defibaugh, University of Vermont

Bats are anomalies in the mammalian world—they fly, have long lifespans, and rarely get cancer. Scientists now suspect the bat immune system enables them to live longer without disease, according to a new study published today in Nature.

An international team led by researchers from the University of Vermont and Penn State University found that the key to the impressive lifespan of bats and their ability to resist cancer is embedded in their DNA––specifically, the way in which bats code genomic changes after exposure to pathogens in their environment.

“Pathogen adaption, longevity, and cancer resistance—they are fundamentally linked,” says Elise Lauterbur, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Vermont and co-lead author of the study. “Many of the genes that have adapted to viruses in bats are genes that are also involved in longevity and cancer resistance.”

By analyzing the bat genome and experimenting on cultivated cells to mimic their response to disease, the researchers identified where in the distant past eight species of Myotis—one of the largest groups of bats and found nearly everywhere except Antarctica—encountered pathogens and how it influenced their evolution. The team screened the genome for positive selection, in this case, adaptation to viruses, to pinpoint structural changes such as gene duplication or deletion, and found key differences in the way bats have adapted to DNA and RNA viruses from humans and other primates.

While humans show positive selection for proteins that interact with RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza, bats have an outsized selection for proteins that react to DNA viruses such hepatitis B and herpes viruses. This suggests a mismatch between humans and bats that can leave both species vulnerable to potential spillover of disease. Curiously, the team also discovered that bats exhibit a unique gene copy mechanism for DNA-repair—a process essential for longevity and resistance to age-related diseases such as cancer.

“One of the things that copy number variation allows is for diversification of the function of the gene,” Lauterbur explains.

Most of the time when coding changes occur it breaks rather than shifting to a new function. Copy number variation allows you to diversify, says Lauterbur. “So potentially, you now have two things you are good at instead of one.”

Assembling the bat genomes

This boosted immune defense strategy may allow bats to respond to multiple viruses or promote longevity using new pathways. The researchers built the first near-complete genomes for eight different Myotis bats to look for clues into how disease resistance played a role.

They collected tissue from Myotis bats in the American West using a novel sampling approach developed by biologist Juan Manuel “Manny” Vazquez, an assistant professor at Penn State University and co-lead author of the study. Instead of harvesting organ tissue, the scientists biopsied tiny circular patches from the wings akin to an ear piercing. Vazquez then used the tissue to grow cell lines and build genomes for the eight species. The approach unlocks new methods for scientists to study animals across their lifespan.

“Here is a way to do science for any animal on earth that doesn’t require killing the animal and is in fact compatible with better science,” Vazquez says.

This was especially important given the sample population includes Myotis lucifugus or little brown bats—North America’s longest living bat species and the one affected most by a deadly fungal infection called white nose syndrome.

Why examine bats in the first place?

Bats are among the most diverse mammalian species—second only to rodents—and live nearly everywhere and eat nearly everything. Bats can also live an extremely long time for their size—think decades rather than years.

“If you look at two bats, the same size, one lives 3 years the other lives 30 years and they are very closely related, like humans and Neanderthals, you can essentially find a very small number of genetic changes that leads to a very big change in their lifespan,” Vazquez explains. “And that is kind of the Holy Grail for evolutionary medicine.”

While scientists have long studied rodents, bats receive less attention. The authors wondered what if bats could provide new insights for human health because they have already evolved longer lifespans? Could the development of flight have propelled the diversity of bats around the world and shifted the evolutionary trade-offs from escaping predators to escaping disease?

Lauterbur studies how species evolve to environmental threats such as pathogens and focuses on disease resistance. Vazquez sequences genomes for insights into aging and age-related diseases. When they both pored over the results they marveled over the genetic changes—one seeing aging genes, the other seeing genes associated with disease.

“These are often studied as separate biological problems, Lauterbur says. “But our results suggest that evolution may be shaping them together.”

Potential pathways for cancer resistance

The research team homed in on a specific immune gene called protein kinease r (PRK) found in every mammal to understand what made the Myotis bats antiviral response so different.

“In every single other mammal that has been looked at, there is one copy of this gene,” Lauterbur explains. “That means there is some important pressure keeping it at one copy. In our very special Myotis bats, there are two copies—or so we thought.”

When she teased apart the genome, Lauterbur found some Myotis bats had one, two, or even three copies of PKR, suggesting additional copies have a protective effect that promote longevity. Collaborators conducted experiments on the various cell lines, splicing copies of PKR into different species and then introduced the cells with a pox virus to gauge their reaction and dosed the cells with chemotherapeutic drug to test how they tolerate and repair damage. The team found little brown bats—the longest living bats of the group—responded differently at high doses where cell damage would most likely occur.

“The little brown bats start committing to kill off cells,” Vazquez says. “Our hypothesis is it’s dumping the cells that can’t be salvaged.”

This adaptation could be critical for curbing the spread of cancer. As organisms age and cellular processes decline, some particularly long-lived species have developed specialized responses from repairing damaged cells, isolating the damage, to throwing cells out upon damage detection.

“The bats seen to be really good at repairing and killing off the damaged cells,” Vazquez says.

While it may be too early to use the unique immune adaptations of bats to solve human pathology, some lessons may be particularly valuable.

“Everything is connected,” Vazquez says. “Everything uses the same shared set of biology. … We don’t have to treat all of these different problems as silos. We can now start focusing on systems like bats to understand how we can solve multiple human age-related diseases.”

Moving forward, Lauterbur wants to explore underappreciated adaptations such as changes in gene copy number, she says. “Those kinds of changes can give evolution additional ways to generate diversity and respond to changing environments, and I think we're only beginning to understand their importance.”

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Additional senior co-authors of the paper include Peter H Sudmant of the University of California, Berkeley; Lucie Etienne of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and David Enard of the University of Arizona, Tucson. The DOI number for this paper is 10.1038/s41586-026-10932-7.