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

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.