A dietary sterol trade-off determines lifespan responses to dietary restriction in females.

Diet plays a significant role in maintaining lifelong health. In particular, lowering the dietary protein: carbohydrate ratio can improve lifespan. This has been interpreted as a direct effect of these macronutrients on physiology.

Sex-specific transcriptomic responses to changes in the nutritional environment.

Males and females typically pursue divergent reproductive strategies and accordingly require different dietary compositions to maximise their fitness. Here we move from identifying sex-specific optimal diets to understanding the molecular mechanisms that underlie male and female responses to dietary variation in . We examine male and female gene expression on male-optimal (carbohydrate-rich) and female-optimal (protein-rich) diets.

Turning food into eggs: insights from nutritional biology and developmental physiology of Drosophila.

Nutrition plays a central role in fecundity, regulating the onset of reproductive maturity, egg production, and the survival and health of offspring from insects to humans. Although decades of research have worked to uncover how nutrition mediates these effects, it has proven difficult to disentangle the relative role of nutrients as the raw material for egg and offspring development versus their role in stimulating endocrine cascades necessary to drive development. This has been further complicated by the fact that both nutrients and the signalling cascades they regulate interact in complex ways to control fecundity.

Using artificial diets to understand the nutritional physiology of Drosophila melanogaster.

Artificial diets have been in use for rearing insects for more than 100 years. Their composition ranges from completely chemically defined (holidic), to semi-defined (meridic) to non-defined (oligidic). Recently, meridic and holidic diets have been used to demonstrate previously unrecognised nutrient-sensitive behaviours and patterns of fitness trait expression in adult Drosophila melanogaster.

Matching complex dietary landscapes with the signalling pathways that regulate life history traits.

The rise in obesity in human populations has reinvigorated research focused on how nutrition impacts life history traits, including body size, lifespan, reproductive success, stress resistance and propensity for disease. Studies have ranged in their approach from identifying the molecular machinery responding to changes in nutrient levels, to understanding the hormonal changes that occur in response to diet, to mapping the response of differing life history traits over complex dietary landscapes. Connecting insights across these approaches presents significant challenges primarily because we lack information about how signalling pathways respond to dietary complexity.