Dietary composition regulatesDrosophilamobility and cardiac physiology

Abstract

SUMMARYThe impact of dietary composition on exercise capacity is a subject of intense study in both humans and model organisms. Interactions between diet and genetics are a crucial component of optimized dietary design. However, the genetic factors governing exercise response are still not well understood. The recent development of invertebrate models for endurance exercise is likely to facilitate study designs examining the conserved interactions between diet, exercise and genetics. As a first step, we used the Drosophila model to describe the effects of varying dietary composition on several physiological indices, including fatigue tolerance and climbing speed, cardiac performance, lipid storage and autophagy. We found that flies of two divergent genetic backgrounds optimize endurance and cardiac performance on relatively balanced low calorie diets. When flies are provided with unbalanced diets, diets higher in sugar than in yeast facilitate greater endurance at the expense of cardiac performance. Importantly, we found that dietary composition has a profound effect on various physiological indices, whereas total caloric intake per se has very little predictive value for performance. We also found that the effects of diet on endurance are completely reversible within 48h if flies are switched to a different diet. Supplementary material available online at

Octopamine Drives Endurance Exercise Adaptations in Drosophila

“…Wild-type males show a distinct age-related decline in endurance, but exercise-trained cohorts have much higher endurance than unexercised siblings at day 25 (Bazzell et al, 2013; Sujkowski et al, 2015) (Fig. 1B).…”

Drosophilaas a model to study obesity and metabolic disease

“…Heart failure rate is highest in obese flies fed high-calorie diets and lowest in lean low-calorie-fed flies (Bazzell et al, 2013). The accumulation of fat in the fly heart is associated with obesity and an increased heart failure rate in fatty acid transport protein mutants (Sujkowski et al, 2012).…”

“…High-calorie obesogenic diets reduced endurance in a repetitive climbing assay (Bazzell et al, 2013), considered to be a measure of both heart and muscle function. Increased muscle activity using a gentle exercise paradigm (approximately 2 h exercise per day over 5 days) led to reduced TAG content, enabling researchers to compare the responses of a range of genotypes to exercise-induced reduction in obesity (Mendez et al, 2016).…”

Deprivation of both sucrose and water reduces the mosquito heart contraction rate while increasing the expression of nitric oxide synthase

“…In this fly species, balanced low calorie diets result in lower myocardial lipid levels and increased cardiac performance (Bazzell et al, 2013;Birse et al, 2010;Lim et al, 2011), whereas diets that are high in sugar induce cardiomyopathy (Na et al, 2013). In Periplaneta americana nymphs, food deprivation does not induce noticeable changes in heart physiology, but food deprivation in aquatic Anopheles quadrimaculatus larvae results in a decrease in the heart rate (Jones, 1956(Jones, , 1977.…”