An Unusual Antagonistic Pleiotropy in the Penna Model for Biological Ageing

Abstract

We combine the Penna Model for biological aging, which is based on the mutation-accumulation theory, with a sort of antagonistic pleiotropy. We show that depending on how the pleiotropy is introduced, it is possible to reproduce both the humans mortality, which increases exponentially with age, and fruitfly mortality, which decelerates at old ages, allowing the appearance of arbitrarily old Methuselah's.