Misaligned plastic and evolutionary responses of lifespan to novel carbohydrate diets
Abstract
Diet elicits varied effects on longevity across a wide range of animal species. For example, diets low in protein and high in carbohydrate typically extend lifespan while diets high in protein tend to reduce it. Although studies have also shown that diet-induced lifespan changes can persist through transgenerational plasticity, whether such changes lead to evolutionary shifts in lifespan remains unclear. In this study we combine experimental evolution and phenotypic plasticity assays to address this gap. Using Drosophila serrata, we investigated the evolutionary potential of lifespan in response to four novel diets spanning a carbohydrate-protein gradient. We also examined developmental plasticity effects using a set of control populations that were raised on the four novel environments. Our results show that although lifespan evolved in response to changes in dietary carbohydrate concentration, the plastic responses for lifespan differed from the evolved responses. The direction of the evolved response (increased lifespan) observed on low carbohydrate diets was in the opposite direction to the plastic response (decreased lifespan). Our results imply that plastic responses to low carbohydrates can be maladaptive for lifespan and misaligned with the evolved responses, laying the groundwork for future investigations of carbohydrate contributions to evolved and plastic effects on lifespan.
README: Title of Dataset: Misaligned plastic and evolutionary responses of lifespan to novel carbohydrate diets
Description of the Data and file structure
The data are from an assay measuring the effects of diet on lifespan in D.serrata
The data set is saved as a excel file. Each row corresponds to observations for one individual.
The data set has the following columns:
id - A unique identification code assigned to each fly.
vial - A vial number nested within diet that records which vial adult flies were reared in.
sex - The sex of the flies
spop - Each alphabet (A-D) corresponds to one of the four replicates for each dietary treatment.
ediet - Evolutionary diet treatments
tdiet - Developmental diet treatments
days - Lifespan of flies
censored 1 if flies were included in the analysis, or zero if flies escaped during the lifespan assay and were excluded from the analysis
N.B Diets 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 correspond to 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 S:Y respectively.