Dietary Protein and Sugar Differentially Affect Development and Metabolic Pools in Ecologically Diverse Drosophila

Abstract

We examined the effects of 3 diets differing in their relative levels of sugar and protein on development and metabolic pools (protein, TG, and glycogen) among sets of isofemale lines of 2 ecologically distinct Drosophila species, D. melanogaster and D. mojavensis. Our high protein:sugar ratio diet contained 7.1% protein and 17.9% carbohydrate, the EPS diet was 4.3% protein and 21.2% carbohydrate, and the LPS was only 2.5% protein and 24.6% carbohydrate. Larvae of D. melanogaster, a generalist fruit breeder, were able to survive on all 3 diets, although all 3 metabolic pools responded with significant diet and diet × line interactions. Development was delayed by the diet with the most sugar relative to protein. The other species, D. mojavensis, a cactus breeder ecologically unaccustomed to encountering simple sugars, completely failed to survive when fed the diet with the highest sugar and showed very poor survival even with the diet with equal parts of protein and sugar. Furthermore, the D. mojavensis adult metabolic pools of protein, TG, and glycogen significantly differed from those of D. melanogaster adults fed the identical diet. Thus, considerable within- and between-species differences exist in how diets are metabolized. Given that the genomes of both of these Drosophila species have been sequenced, these differences and their genetic underpinnings hold promise for understanding human responses to nutrition and for developing strategies for dealing with metabolic disease.

Lipocalin gene expression is varied in developmental stages by larval nutritional stress in Drosophila

“…This result is confirmed by previous research and literature (Onder and Yilmaz, 2009;Önder, 2010;Matzkin et al, 2011;Güler et al, 2014;Neethu et al, 2014); a negative relationship has been shown between the reachability of a protein resource and developmental time.…”

Drosophilaas a model to study obesity and metabolic disease

“…Although females must increase oocyte and whole-animal lipogenesis to support the production of offspring (Sieber and Spradling, 2015), morbid maternal obesity adversely affects egg size, glycogen and TAG content, adult mass and gene expression in offspring and even in the F2 generation (Buescher et al, 2013;Dew-Budd et al, 2016;Matzkin et al, 2013). Highly obesogenic diets reduce fecundity (Brookheart et al, 2017;Matzkin et al, 2013Matzkin et al, , 2011 as does genetically induced obesity (Palu et al, 2017). Interestingly, obesity can affect the metabolic state of the offspring through the male Drosophila germline via effects on histone H3 methylation, a mechanism that appears to be conserved in humans (Öst et al, 2014).…”

Fitness traits of Drosophila melanogaster (Diptera: Drosophilidae) after long-term laboratory rearing on different diets

“…In most nutritional studies on D. melanogaster, the quality of the diet is manipulated by altering the concentrations and ratios of yeast and sugar (Kristensen et al, 2011;Matzkin et al, 2011;Fanson et al, 2012;Güller et al, 2015), or by modifying the food by using different species of yeast (Anagnostou et al, 2010), dietary carbohydrates (Lushchak et al, 2014), lipids, vitamins (Reis, 2016) and food additives (Neethu et al, 2014). However, this study involved using diets that are modifi cations of this fl ies' natural food (tomato, banana, carrot and apple), prepared without adding sugar and yeast.…”

“…melanogaster is one of the most frequently used model organisms in a variety of nutritional studies. Consuming food of different qualities is widely evaluated in ethanoltolerance studies (McKechnie & Geer, 1993), mobility and cardiac physiology (Bazzell et al, 2013), developmental and metabolic studies (Kolss et al, 2009;Matzkin et al, 2011), ageing (Piper & Partridge, 2007, morphological Eur. J. Entomol.…”

“…So far, nutrigenomic studies on D. melanogaster have been used to further our understanding of human nutrigenomics, as metabolism is evolutionarily conserved (Ruden & Lu, 2006), and a promising way of developing strategies for dealing with metabolic diseases (Matzkin et al, 2011).…”