Serotonin 2A receptor signaling coordinates central metabolic processes to modulate aging in response to nutrient choice
Abstract
It has been recognized for nearly a century that diet modulates aging. Despite early experiments suggesting that reduced caloric intake augmented lifespan, accumulating evidence indicates that other characteristics of the diet may be equally or more influential in modulating aging. We demonstrate that behavior, metabolism, and lifespan in Drosophila are affected by whether flies are provided a choice of different nutrients or a single, complete medium, largely independent of the amount of nutrients that are consumed. Meal choice elicits a rapid metabolic reprogramming that indicates a potentiation of TCA cycle and amino acid metabolism, which requires serotonin 2A receptor. Knockdown of glutamate dehydrogenase, a key TCA pathway component, abrogates the effect of dietary choice on lifespan. Our results reveal a mechanism of aging that applies in natural conditions, including our own, in which organisms continuously perceive and evaluate nutrient availability to promote fitness and well-being.
Data availability
Source data for all quantifications shown in Data Figures 1-5, figures supplements and the supplementary files are provided with the paper. Metabolomic raw data, analyses and statistics can be obtained from Supplementary Files 3-4 and our GitHub repository (github.com/ylyu-fly/Metabolomics-FlyChoiceDiet).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Burroughs Wellcome Fund (Collaborative Research Travel Grant,BWF1017452)
- Yang Lyu
National Science Foundation (Graduate Research Fellowship Program,DGE 1256260)
- Kristina J Weaver
National Institutes of Health (R01 AG049494 and P30 AG013280)
- Daniel EL Promislow
National Institutes of Health (R01 AG051649 and R01 AG030593)
- Scott D Pletcher
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Lyu et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 4,355
- views
-
- 441
- downloads
-
- 20
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Chromosomes and Gene Expression
- Cell Biology
eLife is pleased to present a Special Issue to highlight recent advances in the mechanistic understanding of aging and interventions that extend longevity.
-
- Chromosomes and Gene Expression
- Genetics and Genomics
Annotation of newly sequenced genomes frequently includes genes, but rarely covers important non-coding genomic features such as the cis-regulatory modules—e.g., enhancers and silencers—that regulate gene expression. Here, we begin to remedy this situation by developing a workflow for rapid initial annotation of insect regulatory sequences, and provide a searchable database resource with enhancer predictions for 33 genomes. Using our previously developed SCRMshaw computational enhancer prediction method, we predict over 2.8 million regulatory sequences along with the tissues where they are expected to be active, in a set of insect species ranging over 360 million years of evolution. Extensive analysis and validation of the data provides several lines of evidence suggesting that we achieve a high true-positive rate for enhancer prediction. One, we show that our predictions target specific loci, rather than random genomic locations. Two, we predict enhancers in orthologous loci across a diverged set of species to a significantly higher degree than random expectation would allow. Three, we demonstrate that our predictions are highly enriched for regions of accessible chromatin. Four, we achieve a validation rate in excess of 70% using in vivo reporter gene assays. As we continue to annotate both new tissues and new species, our regulatory annotation resource will provide a rich source of data for the research community and will have utility for both small-scale (single gene, single species) and large-scale (many genes, many species) studies of gene regulation. In particular, the ability to search for functionally related regulatory elements in orthologous loci should greatly facilitate studies of enhancer evolution even among distantly related species.