Reasons Why Female Tend to Live Longer than Male

Toxic masculinity will be the end of you. Repetitive sections of the Y chromosome may create toxic effects as Male get older, reducing their lifespan.The full findings of the study were published in the journal PLOS Genetics.

Researchers from the US found that the male fruit flies age due to the repetitive sections in their Y chromosomes becoming active which causes toxic effects. In the previous studies on fruit flies have shown that when repeat sections become active, they impair memory, cause DNA damage and shorten life spans.While both Male and female flies carry these repeat sequences which are more abundant in the Y chromosome which represents a genomic liability. This explains why in species with XY sex chromosomes, such as humans females usually have longer lifespans than their Male counterparts

The study conducted by biologist Alison Nguyen and Doris Bachtrog of the University of California, Berkeley studied a type of fruit fly called Drosophila miranda. Males of this species have twice as much repetitive DNA as their female counterparts and also a significantly shorter lifespan.They identified that in the cells of young Male flies, DNA is kept in a tightly packed form and the repeat sections are turned off. As these flies age, the duo found that the repeat sections can become activated as the DNA forms a looser form which results in toxic side effects.

The researchers wrote that they show transposable elements located on the Y chromosome are less effectively silenced in male Drosophila.’The toxic Y effect appears more pronounced in a species that contains a larger Y chromosome with more repeats and more actively transcribed genes.The DNA damage caused by repeat sections contributes to the physiological effects of aging, they added, but more research will be needed to uncover the exact mechanisms underlying the toxic effects of repeat DNA.