scholarly journals Genotype and Trait Specific Responses to Rapamycin Intake in Drosophila melanogaster

Insects ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Palle Duun Rohde ◽  
Asbjørn Bøcker ◽  
Caroline Amalie Bastholm Jensen ◽  
Anne Louise Bergstrøm ◽  
Morten Ib Juul Madsen ◽  
...  

Rapamycin is a powerful inhibitor of the TOR (Target of Rapamycin) pathway, which is an evolutionarily conserved protein kinase, that plays a central role in plants and animals. Rapamycin is used globally as an immunosuppressant and as an anti-aging medicine. Despite widespread use, treatment efficiency varies considerably across patients, and little is known about potential side effects. Here we seek to investigate the effects of rapamycin by using Drosophila melanogaster as model system. Six isogenic D. melanogaster lines were assessed for their fecundity, male longevity and male heat stress tolerance with or without rapamycin treatment. The results showed increased longevity and heat stress tolerance for male flies treated with rapamycin. Conversely, the fecundity of rapamycin-exposed individuals was lower than for flies from the non-treated group, suggesting unwanted side effects of the drug in D. melanogaster. We found strong evidence for genotype-by-treatment interactions suggesting that a ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to treatment with rapamycin is not recommendable. The beneficial responses to rapamycin exposure for stress tolerance and longevity are in agreement with previous findings, however, the unexpected effects on reproduction are worrying and need further investigation and question common believes that rapamycin constitutes a harmless drug.

Author(s):  
Peter Poór ◽  
Kashif Nawaz ◽  
Ravi Gupta ◽  
Farha Ashfaque ◽  
M. Iqbal R. Khan

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-89
Author(s):  
Amandeep Kaur ◽  
Parveen Chhuneja ◽  
Puja Srivastava ◽  
Kuldeep Singh ◽  
Satinder Kaur

AbstractAddressing the impact of heat stress during flowering and grain filling is critical to sustaining wheat productivity to meet a steadily increasing demand from a rapidly growing world population. Crop wild progenitor species of wheat possess a wealth of genetic diversity for several biotic and abiotic stresses, and morphological traits and can serve as valuable donors. The transfer of useful variation from the diploid progenitor, Aegilops tauschii, to hexaploid wheat can be done through the generation of synthetic hexaploid wheat (SHW). The present study targeted the identification of potential primary SHWs to introduce new genetic variability for heat stress tolerance. Selected SHWs were screened for different yield-associated traits along with three advanced breeding lines and durum parents as checks for assessing terminal heat stress tolerance under timely and late sown conditions for two consecutive seasons. Heat tolerance index based on the number of productive tillers and thousand grain weight indicated that three synthetics, syn9809 (64.32, 78.80), syn14128 (50.30, 78.28) and syn14135 (58.16, 76.03), were able to endure terminal heat stress better than other SHWs as well as checks. One of these synthetics, syn14128, recorded a minimum reduction in thousand kernel weight (21%), chlorophyll content (2.56%), grain width (1.07%) despite minimum grain-filling duration (36.15 d) and has been selected as a potential candidate for introducing the terminal heat stress tolerance in wheat breeding programmes. Breeding efforts using these candidate donors will help develop lines with a higher potential to express the desired heat stress-tolerant phenotype under field conditions.


Antioxidants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
So-Eun Kim ◽  
Chan-Ju Lee ◽  
Sul-U Park ◽  
Ye-Hoon Lim ◽  
Woo Sung Park ◽  
...  

Carotenoids function as photosynthetic accessory pigments, antioxidants, and vitamin A precursors. We recently showed that transgenic sweetpotato calli overexpressing the mutant sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas [L.] Lam) Orange gene (IbOr-R96H), which carries a single nucleotide polymorphism responsible for Arg to His substitution at amino acid position 96, exhibited dramatically higher carotenoid content and abiotic stress tolerance than calli overexpressing the wild-type IbOr gene (IbOr-WT). In this study, we generated transgenic sweetpotato plants overexpressing IbOr-R96H under the control of the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S promoter via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. The total carotenoid contents of IbOr-R96H storage roots (light-orange flesh) and IbOr-WT storage roots (light-yellow flesh) were 5.4–19.6 and 3.2-fold higher, respectively, than those of non-transgenic (NT) storage roots (white flesh). The β-carotene content of IbOr-R96H storage roots was up to 186.2-fold higher than that of NT storage roots. In addition, IbOr-R96H plants showed greater tolerance to heat stress (47 °C) than NT and IbOr-WT plants, possibly because of higher DPPH radical scavenging activity and ABA contents. These results indicate that IbOr-R96H is a promising strategy for developing new sweetpotato cultivars with improved carotenoid contents and heat stress tolerance.


2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (9) ◽  
pp. 1762-1772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Hai Nguyen ◽  
Akihiro Matsui ◽  
Maho Tanaka ◽  
Kayoko Mizunashi ◽  
Kentaro Nakaminami ◽  
...  

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