Dietary restriction reveals sex-specific expression of the mTOR pathway genes in Japanese quails
Limited resources affect an organism’s physiology through the conserved metabolic pathway, the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR). Males and females often react differently to nutritional limitation, but whether it leads to differential mTOR pathway expression remains unknown. Recently, we found...
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Published in | Scientific reports Vol. 14; no. 1; p. 8314 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London
Nature Publishing Group UK
09.04.2024
Nature Publishing Group Nature Portfolio |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Limited resources affect an organism’s physiology through the conserved metabolic pathway, the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR). Males and females often react differently to nutritional limitation, but whether it leads to differential mTOR pathway expression remains unknown. Recently, we found that dietary restriction (DR) induced significant changes in the expression of mTOR pathway genes in female Japanese quails (
Coturnix japonica
). We simultaneously exposed 32 male and female Japanese quails to either 20%, 30%, 40% restriction or ad libitum feeding for 14 days and determined the expression of six key genes of the mTOR pathway in the liver to investigate sex differences in the expression patterns. We found that DR significantly reduced body mass, albeit the effect was milder in males compared to females. We observed sex-specific liver gene expression. DR downregulated
mTOR
expression more in females than in males. Under moderate DR,
ATG9A
and
RPS6K1
expressions were increased more in males than in females. Like females, body mass in males was correlated positively with
mTOR
and
IGF1,
but negatively with
ATG9A
and
RS6K1
expressions. Our findings highlight that sexes may cope with nutritional deficits differently and emphasise the importance of considering sexual differences in studies of dietary restriction. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 2045-2322 2045-2322 |
DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-024-58487-9 |