Effect of domestication on telomere length
The arithmetic mean TL was 24.8 kb for domesticated species and 20.3 kb
for non-domesticated species in the Gomes et al. (2011) dataset.
Controlling for phylogenetic non-independence, there was a marginally
significant positive trend, towards longer telomeres in domesticated
species (βdomestication=0.1467±0.0774, p=0.0633).
Telomeres were significantly longer in domesticated species
(βdomestication=0.1416±0.0615, p=0.0254) when
controlling for telomerase activity, body mass and lifespan (Table 3).
Thus, domestication is predicted to increase TL by 38.5% compared to
non-domesticated species.
Excluding the nine domesticated species from the analyses presented in
Table 1 above did not qualitatively alter our findings (see Table S8),
but the positive association between telomerase activity and lifespan
was attenuated (βtelomerase activity=0.0034±0.0018,
p=0.0703).