An unusual antagonistic pleiotropy in the Penna model for biological ageing

We combine the Penna Model for biological ageing, which is based on the mut ation-accumulation theory, with a sort of antagonistic pleiotropy. We show that depending on how the pleiotropy is introduced, it is possible to repro duce 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. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.