Available online 20 December 2022, 104472

Author links open overlay panelAbstract

Limiting calories or specific nutrients without malnutrition, otherwise known as dietary restriction (DR), has been shown to extend lifespan and reduce reproduction across a broad range of taxa. Our recent findings in Drosophila melanogaster show that supplementing flies on macronutrient-rich diets with additional cholesterol can extend lifespan to the same extent as DR, while also sustaining high egg production. Thus, DR may be beneficial for lifespan because it reduces egg production which in turn reduces the mother’s demand for sterols, thus supporting longer lifespan. It is also possible that mothers live longer and lay more eggs on high sterol diets because the diet triggers enhanced somatic maintenance and promotes egg production, but at the cost of diminished egg quality. To test this, we measured the viability of eggs and development of offspring from mothers fed either cholesterol-sufficient or cholesterol-limiting diets. We found that even when the mother’s diet was completely devoid of cholesterol, viable egg production persisted for ∼10 days. Furthermore, we show that sterol-supplemented flies with long lives lay eggs that have high viability and the same developmental potential as those laid by shorter lived mothers on sterol limiting diets. These findings suggest that offspring viability is not a hidden cost of lifespan extension seen in response to dietary sterol supplementation.

Section snippetsIntroduction:

The availability of food, and its nutritional components, is critical in determining how organisms make investments in key life history traits such as lifelong health and reproductive output. Because of this, a great deal of research has gone into understanding how the nutritional balance of an animal’s diet can be manipulated to extend lifespan. Specifically, studies have shown that manipulating the dietary macronutrient balance to lower the ratio of protein: carbohydrates (P:C) without

Maternal sterol supplies are preferentially used to produce viable eggs when dietary intake is limited

We first assessed the effect of maternal dietary sterol depletion on egg viability by maintaining mothers on synthetic diets that were either sterol depleted (0 g/l) or nutritionally complete (containing 0.3 g/l cholesterol) (Piper et al., 2014). We then scored the total number of eggs laid and their egg-to-adult viability daily for 16 days.

We found that while the number of eggs laid declined over time for flies on both sterol sufficient and depleted foods (Figure 1a), flies from both

Discussion

Over the past several decades, studies have shown that lifespan and reproduction have different nutritional optima (Lee et al., 2008, Skorupa et al., 2008). In particular, high dietary P:C ratios have been shown to reduce lifespan while increasing reproduction. Conversely low dietary P:C ratios have been shown to extend lifespan while reducing reproductive output (Lee et al., 2008, Skorupa et al., 2008). Our recent findings using Drosophila melanogaster females builds upon this existing

Fly Husbandry:

All experiments were conducted using a wild type Drosophila melanogaster strain called Dahomey (Mair et al. 2005). These flies have been maintained in large numbers with overlapping generations to maintain genetic diversity. Flies were reared, mated prior to experiments and maintained under the same conditions described in Zanco et al. (2021).

Experimental Diets:

Holidic medium

To examine the effects of maternal cholesterol on developmental traits a fixed protein (amino acid): carbohydrate (sucrose)

Uncited reference

Andreasen and Stier, 1953, Heier et al.,, Markow, Piper et al.,.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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