Although because of the COVID pandemic some activities have been delayed or had to be cancelled, most of the work proposed in the work packages has been completed as planned. All the experimental procedures and sampling are finished, most of the laboratory analyses are done, databases are completed and some manuscripts have been published whereas others are in preparation.
For WP1, one manuscript is published in American Naturalist. In this paper, I show that life history strategies (high vs low reproductive investment) affect telomere length (a biomarker of ageing) depending on the sex (male or female) and the life period (early development or adulthood). For WP2, one manuscript is under review in Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal and one manuscript is in preparation. These results show that there is a sex-specific within body mosaic of telomere length and oxidative status, and that the life history strategy of the own individual and the reproductive partner can influence such patterns in a tissue-specific way. These results are very novel in the field. Finally, for WP3, two manuscripts are published in American Naturalist and Physiological and Biochemical Zoology journals. One manuscript shows that harsh conditions faced by the parents during their development negatively affect the offspring growth. The second manuscript shows that the oxidative damage of parents during offspring conception negatively affect the future reproductive performance of the daughters. Both manuscripts highlight a sex-specific pattern, with maternal effects being stronger than the paternal ones.
To date, five manuscripts have been published in connection with the project. That is, about physiological biomarkers underlying the ageing process. I expect that at least three more manuscripts will be published. The results have been also disseminated by oral contributions in two congresses: the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB, Montpellier, July 2022) and the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB, Prague, August 2022). The researcher also imparted two invited talks about the project’s results in the Behavioural and Physiological Ecology (BPE) seminars series of the University of Groningen (Groningen, February 2022) and in the symposium “Understanding life-history trade-offs and senescence patterns” (Madrid, September 2022). She also gave a talk in the seminars series of the College of Life and Environmental Sciences (CLES, Penryn, February 2020). In addition, as an alternative mean of results dissemination, the researcher collaborated with her supervisor in the training of two master students and she stablished different laboratory protocols to analyse ageing biomarkers at the host institution. Although no specific website to this project has been developed, results and manuscripts were also disseminated through social networks, as ResearchGate and Twitter.
