Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Rua da Quinta Grande 6, Oeiras 2780-156, Portugal.
Department of Psychobiology, University of Valencia, Avenida Blasco Ibañez, 21, Valencia 46010, Spain.
Biol Lett. 2021 Mar;17(3):20200745. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0745. Epub 2021 Mar 17.
The role of telomerase reverse transcriptase has been widely investigated in the contexts of ageing and age-related diseases. Interestingly, decreased telomerase activities (and accelerated telomere shortening) have also been reported in patients with emotion-related disorders, opening the possibility for subjective appraisal of stressful stimuli playing a key role in stress-driven telomere shortening. In fact, patients showing a pessimistic judgement bias have shorter telomeres. However, in humans the evidence for this is correlational and the causal directionality between pessimism and telomere shortening has not been established experimentally yet. We have developed and validated a judgement bias experimental paradigm to measure subjective evaluations of ambiguous stimuli in zebrafish. This behavioural assay allows classification of individuals in an optimistic-pessimistic dimension (i.e. from individuals that consistently evaluate ambiguous stimuli as negative to others that perceive them as positive). Using this behavioural paradigm we found that telomerase-deficient zebrafish () were more pessimistic in response to ambiguous stimuli than wild-type zebrafish. The fact that individuals with constitutive shorter telomeres have pessimistic behaviours demonstrates for the first time in a vertebrate model a genetic basis of judgement bias.
端粒酶逆转录酶的作用在衰老和与年龄相关的疾病方面已经得到了广泛的研究。有趣的是，与情绪相关的疾病患者的端粒酶活性（和端粒缩短加速）也有所下降，这使得主观评估应激刺激在应激驱动的端粒缩短中发挥关键作用成为可能。事实上，表现出悲观判断偏差的患者端粒较短。然而，在人类中，这方面的证据是相关的，并且悲观情绪和端粒缩短之间的因果关系尚未通过实验来确定。我们开发并验证了一种判断偏差实验范式，用于测量斑马鱼对模糊刺激的主观评价。这种行为测定法可以将个体分为乐观-悲观维度（即从始终将模糊刺激评估为负面的个体到将其视为正面的个体）。使用这种行为范式，我们发现端粒酶缺陷型斑马鱼（）对模糊刺激的反应比野生型斑马鱼更为悲观。具有固有较短端粒的个体表现出悲观行为，这首次在脊椎动物模型中证明了判断偏差的遗传基础。
