Somatic aging pathways regulate reproductive plasticity in Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
Metrics

Abstract

In animals, early-life stress can result in programmed changes in gene expression that can affect their adult phenotype. In C. elegans nematodes, starvation during the first larval stage promotes entry into a stress-resistant dauer stage until environmental conditions improve. Adults that have experienced dauer (postdauers) retain a memory of early-life starvation that results in gene expression changes and reduced fecundity. Here we show that the endocrine pathways attributed to the regulation of somatic aging in C. elegans adults lacking a functional germline also regulate the reproductive phenotypes of postdauer adults that experienced early-life starvation. We demonstrate that postdauer adults reallocate fat to benefit progeny at the expense of the parental somatic fat reservoir and exhibit increased longevity compared to controls. Our results also show that the modification of somatic fat stores due to parental starvation memory is inherited in the F₁ generation and may be the result of crosstalk between somatic and reproductive tissues mediated by the germline nuclear RNAi pathway.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in source files associated with relevant figures.

Article and author information

Author details

Maria C Ow

Department of Biology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Alexandra M Nichitean

Department of Biology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Sarah E Hall

Department of Biology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, United States

For correspondence
shall@syr.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8536-4000

Funding

National Institutes of Health (R01GM129135)

Sarah E Hall

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

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.