Abstract
Consumption of unhealthy diets is exacerbating the burden of age-related ill health in ageing populations. Such diets can programme mammalian physiology to cause long-term, detrimental effects. Recently, we have shown that in Drosophila melanogaster an unhealthy, high-sugar diet in early adulthood programmes lifespan to curtail later-life survival despite subsequent dietary improvement. Excess dietary sugar promotes insulin-like signalling, inhibits dFOXO – the Drosophila homologue of Forkhead Box O (FOXO) transcription factors – and represses expression of dFOXO-target genes encoding epigenetic regulators. This project aims to understand the epigenetic regulation downstream of dFOXO and nutrition in order to elucidate the mechanisms that program animal lifespan.
References
- http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(16)31719-3
- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10522-017-9691-y