Exposure to high-sugar diet induces transgenerational changes in sweet sensitivity and feeding behavior via H3K27me3 reprogramming
Abstract
Human health is facing a host of new threats linked to unbalanced diets, including high sugar diet (HSD), which contributes to the development of both metabolic and behavioral disorders. Studies have shown that diet-induced metabolic dysfunctions can be transmitted to multiple generations of offspring and exert long-lasting health burden. Meanwhile, whether and how diet-induced behavioral abnormalities can be transmitted to the offspring remains largely unclear. Here, we showed that ancestral HSD exposure suppressed sweet sensitivity and feeding behavior in the offspring in Drosophila. These behavioral deficits were transmitted through the maternal germline and companied by the enhancement of H3K27me3 modifications. PCL-PRC2 complex, a major driver of H3K27 trimethylation, was upregulated by ancestral HSD exposure, and disrupting its activity eliminated the transgenerational inheritance of sweet sensitivity and feeding behavior deficits. Elevated H3K27me3 inhibited the expression of a transcriptional factor Cad and suppressed sweet sensitivity of the sweet-sensing gustatory neurons, reshaping the sweet perception and feeding behavior of the offspring. Taken together, we uncovered a novel molecular mechanism underlying behavioral abnormalities spanning multiple generations of offspring upon ancestral HSD exposure, which would contribute to the further understanding of long-term health risk of unbalanced diet.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession codes GSE216075 and GSE215756.All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file; Source Data files have been provided for all figures and supplementary figures.
-
Histone methylation mediates transgenerational modulations of sweet perception by high sugar diet [ChIP-Seq]NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE216075.
-
Histone methylation mediates transgenerational modulations of sweet perception by high sugar dietNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE215756.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFA0802400)
- Liming Wang
National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFA0801900)
- Liming Wang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (32071006)
- Liming Wang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Jun Ding, Stanford University, United States
Version history
- Received: December 5, 2022
- Preprint posted: January 18, 2023 (view preprint)
- Accepted: September 11, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: September 12, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: October 6, 2023 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2023, Yang 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
-
- 2,481
- views
-
- 385
- downloads
-
- 3
- 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
-
- Neuroscience
Functional interactions between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, as revealed by strong oscillatory synchronization in the theta (6–11 Hz) frequency range, correlate with memory-guided decision-making. However, the degree to which this form of long-range synchronization influences memory-guided choice remains unclear. We developed a brain-machine interface that initiated task trials based on the magnitude of prefrontal-hippocampal theta synchronization, then measured choice outcomes. Trials initiated based on strong prefrontal-hippocampal theta synchrony were more likely to be correct compared to control trials on both working memory-dependent and -independent tasks. Prefrontal-thalamic neural interactions increased with prefrontal-hippocampal synchrony and optogenetic activation of the ventral midline thalamus primarily entrained prefrontal theta rhythms, but dynamically modulated synchrony. Together, our results show that prefrontal-hippocampal theta synchronization leads to a higher probability of a correct choice and strengthens prefrontal-thalamic dialogue. Our findings reveal new insights into the neural circuit dynamics underlying memory-guided choices and highlight a promising technique to potentiate cognitive processes or behavior via brain-machine interfacing.
-
- Neuroscience
Hippocampal place cells in freely moving rodents display both theta phase precession and procession, which is thought to play important roles in cognition, but the neural mechanism for producing theta phase shift remains largely unknown. Here, we show that firing rate adaptation within a continuous attractor neural network causes the neural activity bump to oscillate around the external input, resembling theta sweeps of decoded position during locomotion. These forward and backward sweeps naturally account for theta phase precession and procession of individual neurons, respectively. By tuning the adaptation strength, our model explains the difference between ‘bimodal cells’ showing interleaved phase precession and procession, and ‘unimodal cells’ in which phase precession predominates. Our model also explains the constant cycling of theta sweeps along different arms in a T-maze environment, the speed modulation of place cells’ firing frequency, and the continued phase shift after transient silencing of the hippocampus. We hope that this study will aid an understanding of the neural mechanism supporting theta phase coding in the brain.