Edmands Suzanne
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Front Aging. 2024 Mar 8;5:1361396. doi: 10.3389/fragi.2024.1361396. eCollection 2024.
The Mother's Curse hypothesis posits that mothers curse their sons with harmful mitochondria, because maternal mitochondrial inheritance makes selection blind to mitochondrial mutations that harm only males. As a result, mitochondrial function may be evolutionarily optimized for females. This is an attractive explanation for ubiquitous sex differences in lifespan and aging, given the prevalence of maternal mitochondrial inheritance and the established relationship between mitochondria and aging. This review outlines patterns expected under the hypothesis, and traits most likely to be affected, chiefly those that are sexually dimorphic and energy intensive. A survey of the literature shows that evidence for Mother's Curse is limited to a few taxonomic groups, with the strongest support coming from experimental crosses in . Much of the evidence comes from studies of fertility, which is expected to be particularly vulnerable to male-harming mitochondrial mutations, but studies of lifespan and aging also show evidence of Mother's Curse effects. Despite some very compelling studies supporting the hypothesis, the evidence is quite patchy overall, with contradictory results even found for the same traits in the same taxa. Reasons for this scarcity of evidence are discussed, including nuclear compensation, factors opposing male-specific mutation load, effects of interspecific hybridization, context dependency and demographic effects. Mother's Curse effects may indeed contribute to sex differences, but the complexity of other contributing factors make Mother's Curse a poor general predictor of sex-specific lifespan and aging.
“母亲的诅咒”假说认为，母亲会将有害的线粒体遗传给儿子，因为线粒体由母系遗传，这使得自然选择对仅危害雄性的线粒体突变视而不见。因此，线粒体功能在进化过程中可能针对雌性进行了优化。鉴于母系线粒体遗传的普遍性以及线粒体与衰老之间已确立的关系，这为寿命和衰老中普遍存在的性别差异提供了一个有吸引力的解释。这篇综述概述了该假说下预期出现的模式，以及最可能受影响的性状，主要是那些具有性别二态性且耗能高的性状。对文献的调查表明，“母亲的诅咒”的证据仅限于少数几个分类群，其中最有力的支持来自于……的实验杂交。许多证据来自对生育力的研究，生育力预计特别容易受到危害雄性的线粒体突变的影响，但对寿命和衰老的研究也显示出“母亲的诅咒”效应的证据。尽管有一些非常有说服力的研究支持该假说，但总体证据相当零散，甚至在同一分类群中对相同性状也发现了相互矛盾的结果。文中讨论了证据稀少的原因，包括核补偿、对抗雄性特异性突变负荷的因素、种间杂交的影响、背景依赖性和人口统计学效应。“母亲的诅咒”效应可能确实导致了性别差异，但其他影响因素的复杂性使得“母亲的诅咒”难以成为预测性别特异性寿命和衰老的普遍有效指标。
