Wing: A suitable nonlethal tissue type for repeatable and rapid telomere length estimates in bats.

Area of Science:

• Ecology and evolutionary biology
• Genomics and molecular biology

Background:

• Telomeres serve as biomarkers for aging and environmental stress.
• Blood sampling for telomere length (TL) measurement is challenging in small mammals like bats.
• Tissue-specific variation in TL necessitates identifying representative tissues.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess wing biopsies as a proxy for measuring relative telomere length (rTL) in Egyptian fruit bats.
• To compare rTL across multiple tissues including blood, brain, heart, kidney, liver, lung, muscle, and wing.
• To determine the intra-individual repeatability of rTL measurements from wing biopsies.

Main Methods:

• Quantitative PCR (qPCR) was used to measure rTL.
• Telomeres were analyzed from blood, brain, heart, kidney, liver, lung, muscle, and wing tissues.
• Multiple wing biopsies were collected from individual bats to assess repeatability.

Main Results:

• Wing rTL correlated with rTL from most tissues, excluding blood.
• Blood rTL showed no significant correlation with any other tissue.
• Wing tissue demonstrated high intra-individual repeatability (>70%) for rTL measurements.

Conclusions:

• Wing tissue is a suitable proxy for measuring rTL in bats, especially when blood sampling is not feasible.
• Results provide valuable insights into tissue-specific telomere dynamics in bats.
• Supports the use of non-invasive wing biopsies for ecological and evolutionary studies of telomere length.