Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 15, 2026

Surveying Low-Cost Methods to Measure Lifespan and Healthspan in Caenorhabditis elegans
Published on: May 18, 2022
Are some conventional measures of the rate of ageing consistent with antagonistic pleiotropy?
1Via Molinari 14/B, Pordenone 33170, Italy. stegiaimo@gmail.com
Abstract:
Several measures of the rate of ageing have been proposed in the literature. But are they all equally good? In this work, three of these measures are considered: ωG and the parameter b for the Gompertz model, and ωW for the Weibull model. It is shown that ωG and ωW may fail to detect genuine changes in the rate of ageing when this rate varies in response to the fixation of antagonistic-pleiotropic mutations with effects on survival, while the parameter b never fails to detect such changes. It is suggested that ωG and ωW are inconsistent with the antagonistic pleiotropy model for the evolution of ageing. Hence, they should not be used to test any prediction that this model is supposed to entail about the evolution of the rate of ageing, notably, Williams' prediction according to which the higher the level of environmental mortality, the higher the evolutionarily favoured rate of ageing.
Related Concept Videos
Pleiotropy
Hardy-Weinberg Principle
Lethal Alleles
Lucien Cuénot discovered lethal alleles in 1905 while studying the inheritance of coat color in mice. The agouti gene is responsible for the color of the coat in mice. This gene codes for an agouti-signaling protein, which is responsible for melanin distribution in mammals. The wild-type allele gives rise to gray-brown coat color in mice, while the mutant allele gives rise to yellow coat color. In addition to coat color, the agouti gene is associated with the yellow...
Epistasis
Multiple Allele Traits
Epistasis Analysis

