Nutritional history affects stress-resistance architecture across ageing and sex
- 1Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research
Abstract
Diet can influence lifespan and age-dependent physiological function, but how nutrition during development and adulthood affects relationships among stress resistance traits across age remains unclear. Using an isocaloric full-factorial larval x adult diet design in outbred Drosophila melanogaster, we tested how protein- and carbohydrate-biased diets affected starvation, desiccation, cold, osmotic, and heat resistance across the adult life course and sex. We also measured whole-body triacylglyceride, protein, body weight, and water content, and compared responses with matched lifespan and reproductive-output data. Resistance declined across the adult life course, but the traits did not vary as a single phenotype: among the traits included in the covariance analysis, desiccation, osmotic, and heat resistance formed a tightly correlated core, whereas starvation resistance remained comparatively peripheral in both sexes. Developmental diet produced trait-specific effects, whereas protein-biased adult diet favoured heat and osmotic resistance, paralleling effects on lifespan and reproductive output, but had opposite effects on starvation and cold resistance in specific contexts. Thus, nutrition alters rather than uniformly improves stress resistance, and covariance among resistance traits does not necessarily predict how those traits respond to nutritional perturbation.
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BibTeX
@misc{kumar2026nutritional,
title = {{Nutritional history affects stress-resistance architecture across ageing and sex}},
author = {D. Kumar and M. Chandrakanth and C. S and C. Sura and N. Kumar and S. Tung},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.08.750110},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.08.750110v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Nutritional history affects stress-resistance architecture across ageing and sex
AU - D. Kumar
AU - M. Chandrakanth
AU - C. S
AU - C. Sura
AU - N. Kumar
AU - S. Tung
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.08.750110
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.08.750110v1
AB - Diet can influence lifespan and age-dependent physiological function, but how nutrition during development and adulthood affects relationships among stress resistance traits across age remains unclear. Using an isocaloric full-factorial larval x adult diet design in outbred Drosophila melanogaster, we tested how protein- and carbohydrate-biased diets affected starvation, desiccation, cold, osmotic, and heat resistance across the adult life course and sex. We also measured whole-body triacylglyceride, protein, body weight, and water content, and compared responses with matched lifespan and reproductive-output data. Resistance declined across the adult life course, but the traits did not vary as a single phenotype: among the traits included in the covariance analysis, desiccation, osmotic, and heat resistance formed a tightly correlated core, whereas starvation resistance remained comparatively peripheral in both sexes. Developmental diet produced trait-specific effects, whereas protein-biased adult diet favoured heat and osmotic resistance, paralleling effects on lifespan and reproductive output, but had opposite effects on starvation and cold resistance in specific contexts. Thus, nutrition alters rather than uniformly improves stress resistance, and covariance among resistance traits does not necessarily predict how those traits respond to nutritional perturbation.
ER -