TXST researcher explores why females and males age differently

Across the animal kingdom, aging is not one-size-fits-all. Females and males can differ in how long they live, how long they stay healthy, and how aging affects them over time. In humans, women generally outlive men, yet those additional years can come with a greater burden of age-related disease, a phenomenon known as the healthspan-lifespan gap, or the divide between years lived and years lived in good health. Across other species, the lifespan gap can narrow, disappear, or even reverse.

Why those differences develop, and why they vary so widely remains a fundamental question in biology.

Peggy Biga, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Biology at Texas State University, is helping answer it using fish to investigate how genetics, biological traits, environmental conditions, and evolutionary history shape aging.

Biga is part of the National Science Foundation-funded Integration Initiative: Sex, Aging, Genomics, and Evolution (IISAGE), which tracks sex-specific aging across the animal kingdom. The initiative focuses on building foundational knowledge about the biological mechanisms that shape aging rather than studying specific diseases.

At TXST, Biga and her team, including doctoral students Ireen Lin and Abby Quimby and technician Yoli Lemus Saldivar, are studying young and old female and male fish. They are examining how an animal’s genetic makeup, physical sex traits, and environment influence aging. Untangling those factors can help researchers determine which biological processes are most closely tied to differences in lifespan and healthspan.

The fish data will be compared with studies of insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, and other animals as part of IISAGE’s broader research effort. IISAGE researchers will use large biological datasets and computational tools, including machine learning, to spot patterns that may be hidden when studying a single species or biological process alone.

Building connections in aging research  

Biga also received NSF support for a Genomics and Epigenomics of Aging workshop at the 34th International Plant and Animal Genome Conference in 2027.

The workshop will bring together researchers and trainees across aging, genomics, epigenomics, and agricultural sciences to share findings, identify new questions, and spark interdisciplinary collaborations that could lead to future research proposals, publications, presentations, and data sharing.

The workshop complements IISAGE’s broader effort to create tools and knowledge useful across disciplines.

“Ultimately, this research will generate foundational knowledge with broad implications for human health, conservation, and agriculture, while providing valuable datasets, training opportunities, and collaborative resources that benefit the broader scientific community,” Biga said.