{"doi":"10.1101/2025.11.26.690843","title":"Widespread sex-biased gene expression reflects female-biased longevity in a species with environmental sex determination","abstract":"Abstract Sexes frequently differ in life history traits including body size, lifespan, and age at sexual maturity. Aging, the progressive decline in physiological function and cellular resilience over time, is a central process contributing to sex-specific life histories, yet the mechanisms driving sex differences in aging remain largely unresolved. Long-term mark-recapture efforts revealed a striking pattern of female-biased longevity in the painted turtle ( Chrysemys picta ), a species with temperature-dependent sex determination. As a result, this species provides a compelling system to examine the mechanisms of sex-specific aging in the absence of sex chromosomes. Here, we characterize sex- and age-associated patterns in the blood transcriptomes of wild painted turtles (n = 93). We identified widespread gene expression differences between females and males (2,347 genes; 13.4% of all filtered genes). In contrast, only six genes showed significant linear relationships with continuous age in both sexes. We also employed a machine learning approach which identified distinct sets of genes for which expression was predictive of age in each sex. Age-related gene expression patterns highlight both conserved molecular pathways with known roles in aging as well as novel gene targets. These findings suggest sex-specific molecular processes underlie sex-biased demographic aging and raise questions regarding the environmental and developmental drivers of sex-biased gene expression.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2025,"id":583783,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9528,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":568498,"name":"Luke A. Hoekstra","orcid":"0000-0002-6122-8100","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1496729,"name":"Kelsi Hagerty","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":254717,"name":"Robert E. Schmidt","orcid":"0000-0002-8334-5893","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568497,"name":"Jessica Martin Judson","orcid":"0000-0002-0137-654X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1496730,"name":"Maxwell Adorsoo","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":347248,"name":"Ritambhara Singh","orcid":"0000-0002-7523-160X","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568500,"name":"Fredric J. Janzen","orcid":"0000-0002-5919-196X","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":264249,"name":"Anne M. Bronikowski","orcid":"0000-0001-6432-298X","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":447144,"name":"Samantha L. Bock","orcid":"0000-0002-2124-1490","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:59:07.970345Z","pmid":"41377510","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}