Age-related Decline of Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Young Drosophila melanogaster Adults.
Stress tolerance generally declines with age as a result of functional senescence. Age-dependent alteration of stress tolerance can also occur in early adult life. In Drosophila melanogaster, evidence of such a decline in young adults has only been reported for thermotolerance. It is not known whether early adult life entails a general stress tolerance reduction and whether the response is peculiar to thermal traits. The present work was designed to investigate whether newly eclosed D melanogaster adults present a high tolerance to a range of biotic and abiotic insults. We found that tolerance to most of the abiotic stressors tested (desiccation, paraquat, hydrogen peroxide, deltamethrin, and malathion) was high in newly eclosed adults before dramatically declining over the next days of adult life. No clear age-related pattern was found for resistance to biotic stress (septic or fungal infection) and starvation. These results suggest that newly eclosed adults present a culminating level of tolerance to extrinsic stress which is likely unrelated to immune process. We argue that stress tolerance variation at very young age is likely a residual attribute from the previous life stage (ontogenetic carryover) or a feature related to the posteclosion development.
UMR CNRS 6553 ECOBIO, Université de Rennes 1, France. herve.colinet@univ-rennes1.fr.
Hervé
H
Colinet
Institut of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris (iEES Paris), UPMC Université Paris, France.
Thomas
T
Chertemps
Institut of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris (iEES Paris), UPMC Université Paris, France.|UFR Sciences Exactes et Naturelles, Université des Antilles, Cedex, France.
Isabelle
I
Boulogne
Institut of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris (iEES Paris), UPMC Université Paris, France.
David
D
Siaussat
D000367:Age Factors; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D003890:Desiccation; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology*; D004926:Escherichia coli; D005658:Fungi; D007306:Insecticides / Q000633:toxicity; D007814:Larva / Q000502:physiology; D016982:Micrococcus luteus; D018384:Oxidative Stress; D013217:Starvation; D013312:Stress, Physiological
D007306:Insecticides
Abiotic stress; Biotic stress; Drosophila; Young age