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deemed-to-be university, Thanjavur. Some results of the work and a review have been published in Biology Open and Biogerontology, respectively. Apart from the main research work, a brief first author interview has been published in Biology Open.
PR is known to influence development time, lifespan, egg output and stress resistance of the adult fruit fly compared with the fully fed flies (control). But a long-standing misconception that hindered the actual concept of PR was its implementation from the egg stage of the flies. Briefly, the fruit flies have two life stages: (i) pre-adult stage (egg to adult fly; spanning for approximately 9–10 days), (ii) adult stage (age 1 day of adult fly till death, which is approximately 60–80 days). Since the pre-adult stage is seen to influence most of the adult fitness and its related traits, not many fly biologists attempted pre-adult DR or PR manipulations. We attempted to understand the effect of PR on different
stages of the flies (pre-adult,
age 1 and age 8 days of adults)
and found that PR was highly
beneficial when it was imposed
from the pre-adult stage. Thus,
this study made it to the list of
one of the few studies that went
on to report the same.
In addition to these
common fitness parameters
such as lifespan and egg
output, we reported, for the
first time, the effect of PR on
the pupation height of fruit flies.
Pupation height of the flies, upon exposure to lower protein concentrations, showed that larvae were able to wander high up in the vials and pupate, thereby achieving pupation height equal to that of the control. These results suggested that energy utilization or the normal activity of the larvae was not disturbed even when the protein was reduced. This
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featureofthefliesmightconcernevolutionary biologists, that if they pupate higher from the food surface, it might decrease their chances of survival due to a relatively less humidity at the top of the culture vial. But surprisingly, the flies showed no difference in their pre-adult to adult survivorship, thereby suggesting that the reported concentrations of PR were not detrimental and did not challenge the chances of flies’ survival.
Based on a variety of such preliminary results, we have started to maintain flies on long-term PR from pre-adult and adult stages. We aim to address probably both sides of the coin (short-term and long-term PR) and hence have started to assess the effect of this long- term PR on the flies. By this, we will assay whether a long-term restriction is harmful to the flies or whether it still manages to deliver the prior observed positive effect of PR. The research will also benefit from experiments
to assess the body size and body weight changes in the flies over a particular period of PR implementation. Restricting nutrients in the diet can confer increased resistance to stressors such as starvation and desiccation, and undoubtedly might confer benefits across age. Thus, this study potentially provides evidence that unnecessary protein intake is definitely not beneficial, thereby contributing very little to our healthy living
and significantly to faster ageing.
The possible reason why all these DR
approaches are working might be a relay of physiological and metabolic processes in our body. Sugars (carbohydrates) in the food plunge into a storage form of glycogen, but proteins stand out as our body does not employ storage mechanism for the same.
The research of nutritional geometry studies on a large scale is done on model organisms, including yeast, fruit flies and rodents such as mice, with intent to achieve maximum translatability to humans.