Fitness Analysis and Transcriptome Profiling Following Repeated Mild Heat Stress of Varying Frequency in Drosophila melanogaster Females

• Published in: Biology (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 10; no. 12; p. 1323
• Main Authors: Gruntenko, Nataly E, Karpova, Evgenia K, Babenko, Vladimir N, Vasiliev, Gennady V, Andreenkova, Olga V, Bobrovskikh, Margarita A, Menshanov, Petr N, Babenko, Roman O, Rauschenbach, Inga Yu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 14-12-2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Body composition; Body mass; Carbohydrate metabolism; Carbohydrates; Dopamine; Eclosion; Environmental conditions; Experiments; Fat body; Fertility; Fitness; Food; Gene expression; Glucose; Glycerol; Heat shock proteins; Heat stress; Insects; Kinases; Longevity; Males; Metabolism; Metabolites; Proteolysis; Reagents; transcriptome; Transcriptomes; Trehalose; Triglycerides; Turandot; United States > US; heat stress; Turandot; transcriptome; fertility; longevity; Hsp23; metabolism
• ISSN: 2079-7737; 2079-7737
• DOI: 10.3390/biology10121323

Understanding how repeated stress affects metabolic and physiological functions in the long run is of crucial importance for evaluating anthropogenic pressure on the environment. We investigated fertility, longevity and metabolism in
females exposed to short-term heat stress (38 °C, 1 h) repeated daily or weekly. Daily stress was shown to cause a significant decrease in both fertility and longevity, as well as in body mass and triglyceride (fat) content, but a significant increase in trehalose and glucose content. Weekly stress did not affect longevity and carbohydrate metabolism but resulted in a significant decrease in body mass and fat content. Weekly stress did not affect the total level of fertility, despite sharp fertility drops on the exact days of stressing. However, stressing insects weekly, only in the first two weeks after eclosion, caused a significant increase in the total level of fertility. The analysis of differentially expressed genes in the fat bodies and adjacent tissues of researched groups with the use of RNA-Seq profiling revealed changes in signal pathways related to proteolysis/digestion, heat shock protein 23, and in the tightly linked stress-inducible humoral factor
gene network.