Picture of short tailed bat taken in Fiordland. Photo: Supplied / Ben Paris
Cultural omen of darkness, reservoir of deadly viruses - bats do not have the best reputation.
But they do have some impressive and potentially helpful biological quirks, including the ability to resist the ageing process.
Of the nineteen species of mammals that live longer than humans when adjusted for body size, eighteen are bats.
So what is it about bats that allows them to fend off ageing?
Geneticist professor Emma Teeling is on the hunt for answers to this question. She founded the University College of Dublin's BatLab and is co-founder of the Bat1K project which aims to map the genomes of all 1400 species of bat.
Speaking to Kim Hill on Saturday Morning, Teeling said the only way to measure the age of bats is by catching them and putting a little tag on them, and then catching them again years later.
The bat species that holds the record for age is called a Myotis brandtii.
"It was caught as an adult and it was caught 41 years later," Teeling said.
"Now, what's extraordinary about this is that it was so small, it weighed about a third of a lab mouse, and small things typically don't live for a long time.
"So if you're to equate for body size, this would indicate that that species was living up to about 250 human years … without showing signs of ageing, and the majority of bats that we studied in this way live way, way longer than expected given their body size."
Small creatures usually do not live long and having a high level of metabolism can come with a cost, she said.
But bats were "bucking this trend" and were the smallest mammals living the longest when judged by their body size.
Teeling said it was believed bats' ability to fly had something to do with it.
"They've had to evolve ways to deal with the negative side effects of this high metabolism, potentially driven by flight."
"What's unique about the bats, what I really like to think about, is the majority of bats are these super-agers, so you've got potentially 1500 different unique solutions in how we can slow down ageing, but also, how we can fight viruses and live with them, are found within bat genomes."
The goal was to study genomes from every single living species of bat. Teeling said 113 had been sequenced so far.
Research has shown that bats have "switched off" part of their inflammatory response and in return, evolved a "really aggressive" anti-viral response to fight infection.
Applying that to humans, Teeling said once it is fully understood, drugs can be created for the immune system.
"The immune system is one of the easiest things to drug, so we have the same genes, we can switch it on, switch it off, you can mimic the anti-viral, anti-inflammatory response with drugs.
"There's work that's being done right now and you'll find some of these bat genes are much more potent anti-inflammatory responders than other genes, so we'll be able to make drugs to mimic this."
Teeling predicted this could be happening within the next 5-10 years.
The first drugs would help humans deal with disease and have better outcomes from illnesses such as the flu and infectious diseases.
It was the "easy part". The next would be looking at how the research could help extend life spans and whether or not the "unique immune tweaks" bats have made also drives their extended life span.
"We will learn from bats in that way."
