Conserved metallomics in two insect families evolving separately for a hundred million years

Abstract

Μetal cofactors are required for enzymatic catalysis and structural stability of many proteins. Physiological metal requirements underpin the evolution of cellular and systemic regulatory mechanisms for metal uptake, storage and excretion. Considering the role of metal biology in animal evolution, this paper asks whether metal content is conserved between different fruit flies. A similar metal homeostasis was previously observed in Drosophilidae flies cultivated on the same larval medium. Each species accumulated in the order of 200 µg iron and zinc and approximately ten-fold less manganese and copper per gram dry weight of the adult insect. In this paper, data on the metal content in fourteen species of Tephritidae, which are major agricultural pests worldwide, are presented. These fruit flies can be polyphagous (e.g., Ceratitis capitata) or strictly monophagous (e.g., Bactrocera oleae) or oligophagous (e.g., Anastrepha grandis) and were maintained in the laboratory on five distinct diets based on olive oil, carrot, wheat bran, zucchini and molasses, respectively. The data indicate that overall metal content and distribution between the Tephritidae and Drosophilidae species was similar. Reduced metal concentration was observed in B. oleae. Feeding the polyphagous C. capitata with the diet of B. oleae resulted in a significant quantitative reduction of all metals. Thus, dietary components affect metal content in some Tephritidae. Nevertheless, although the evidence suggests some fruit fly species evolved preferences in the use or storage of particular metals, no metal concentration varied in order of magnitude between these two families of Diptera that evolved independently for over 100 million years.

Mouse genetic background impacts both on iron and non-iron metals parameters and on their relationships

“…However, comparing concentrations, it has been reported that Zn, Cu and Mn concentrations may vary between Tephritidae (fruit flies) species fed with their regular diet. In addition those parameters can be changed by modification of regimen (Rempoulakis et al 2014).…”

Microbial composition affects the performance of an artificial Tephritid larval diet

“…Good yielding diets showed relatively low egg to pupa recovery (around 3% to 7%), but good pupal weight that developed into adults. The D. ciliatus egg-pupal efficacy, although relatively low, is comparable with the production of other tephritid fruit flies for which the development of diets has been particularly difficult, such as olive fly, Bactrocera oleae (Dimou et al, 2010;Rempoulakis et al, 2014b), and is probably related to the oligophagous nature of this fly (Rempoulakis et al, 2014a). A future research task will be of course to increase the yield of the diet and the observed eggpupa recovery for a viable mass rearing system towards SIT application against D. ciliatus.…”

Characterization of Drosophila CMP-sialic acid synthetase activity reveals unusual enzymatic properties

“…These differences between the human and Drosophila enzyme support the hypothesis of evolutionary adaptation of these enzymes to distinct subcellular environments. Interestingly, Zn 2+ and Fe 2+ are both present in Drosophila at relatively high levels [35]. They are essential for Drosophila development and physiology and known to be specifically transported to the Golgi compartment [36, 37], which indicates that these metal ions are reasonable candidates for endogenous cofactors of DmCSAS.…”