Transiently restricting individual amino acids protects D. melanogaster against multiple stressors

Abstract

Nutrition and resilience are linked, though it is not yet clear how diet confers stress resistance or the breadth of stressors that it can protect against. We have previously shown that transiently restricting an essential amino acid can extend lifespan and also protect against nicotine exposure in Drosophila melanogaster, raising the possibility that amino acid restriction is geroprotective because of elevated detoxification capacity. Here, we sought to characterise the nature of this dietary mediated protection, and determine whether it was sex, amino acid, and/or nicotine specific. When we compared between sexes, we found that isoleucine deprivation increases female, but not male, nicotine resistance. Surprisingly, we found that this protection afforded to females was not replicated by dietary protein restriction and was instead specific to individual amino acid restriction. Other studies have documented methionine or leucine restriction conferring stress resistance, though we previously found that individually depriving them did not increase nicotine resistance. We therefore wondered whether reducing the severity of restriction of these amino acids could confer nicotine resistance. This was true for methionine restriction, and we found that flies fed a diet containing 25% methionine for 7 days protected against subsequent nicotine poisoning ([~]30% longer lived than controls with all amino acids). However, when dietary leucine was altered, nicotine resistance changed, but no single diet was protective. To understand whether these beneficial effects of diet were specific to nicotine or were generalisable across stressors, we pre-treated with amino acid restriction diets and exposed them to other types of stress. We did not find any diets that protected against heat stress or infection with the bacterium Enterococcus faecalis. However, we found that some of the diets that protected against nicotine also protected against oxidative and starvation stress, and improved survival following cold shock. Interestingly, we found that a diet lacking isoleucine was the only diet to protect against all these stressors. These data point to isoleucine as a critical determinant of robustness in the face of environmental challenges.