Complex interactions may matter most for longevity, not single factors

May 16, 2014
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David Rand, left, and Chen-Tseh Zhu managed 18 different lines of fruit flies, feeding groups from each line five different diets. They were able to examine the effects on longevity of three different elements: diet, mitochondrial DNA, and nuclear DNA. (Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University)

A new study of the biology of aging by Brown University biologists shows that complex interactions among diet, mitochondrial DNA, and nuclear DNA appear to influence lifespan at least as much as single factors alone. The findings may help scientists better understand the underlying mechanisms of aging and explain why studies of single factors sometimes produce contradictory results.

“I think the main lesson is that these interaction effects are as significant or important as the [single] effects, such as diet effects alone or genetic effect alone,” said David Rand, professor of biology and senior author of the study published in the journal PLoS Genetics (open access).

“Traditionally that’s what people have focused on: looking for a gene that extends longevity or a diet that extends longevity.”

When researchers have looked at single or even pairs of factors in a wide variety of organisms, they’ve made many valuable findings about the biology of aging, Rand said. But sometimes scientists have been unable to replicate each other’s findings in seemingly similar experiments.

Often this is attributed to mysterious “background effects,” presumably other genes that were not properly accounted for. The new study chose to put such background effects into the foreground to examine dietary effects on aging in several panels of different nuclear and mitochondrial genetic pairings, the biologist say.

The study’s results suggest that many observed effects of calorie or diet restriction or different genes on lifespan may depend on a more intricate context than has been understood so far.

Rather than despairing that combinatorial interactions of diets, nuclear genes, and mitochondrial genes make the underlying biology of aging intractably complex, Rand and lead author Chen-Tseh Zhu said studies that explicitly embrace such multifactorial interactions can lead researchers to understand the inherent biological complexity of the aging process: Many genes, many cells, and many environments all contribute to the aging process. With such observations they could then trace which mitochondrial genes moderate which nuclear genes in response to a particular diet.

“Focused studies of single factors that prove unrepeatable in different backgrounds are not general results,” Rand said. “But the interaction between these factors may get us closer to generalities.

Complicated combinations


Diagram of diets used in this study.The horizontal axis shows the sugar concentration and the vertical axis shows yeast concentration, both as weight/volume. The Roman numerals are the shorthand used in the text and figures, and the numbers in parentheses show the ratios of sugar/yeast. The diets I-II-III span a diet concentration axis reflecting caloric restriction(CR); the diets IV-II-V span a diet composition axis reflecting diet restriction (DR). (Credit: Chen-Tseh Zhu, Paul Ingelmo, David M. Rand, PLoS Genetics)

For the study Rand, Zhu and undergraduate co-author Paul Ingelmo generated 18 lines of flies by mixing and matching different mitochondrial and nuclear genomes in individuals from two different species. Then they fed members of each of those fly populations from a menu of five different diets.

Some diets held calories constant but varied the balance between yeast (protein) and sugar (carbs), while some diets varied the total calories but kept the proportions of nutrients constant.

In several cases described in the paper, the team saw how interactions among the three factors they manipulated could produce results that would thoroughly frustrate people who were too focused on just one factor.

For example, in flies with the “w1118” nuclear genome and the “OreR” mitochondrial genome, lifespan was greatest with the high-sugar, low-yeast diet and significantly worse with the diet that balanced yeast and sugar evenly.

But for flies with the same nuclear genome but the “Zim” mitochondrial genome, the balanced diet was just as good, if not slightly better than the high-sugar, low-yeast meals.

Another illustrative finding was that the sirt1 nuclear gene, which is an important but controversial gene in aging research, Rand said, shows different effects on longevity given different mitochondrial genomes.

Future work can focus on tracing the physiological and biochemical pathways suggested by these multidimensional interactions, Rand said.

“What this does is identify genetic interactions that themselves are modified by diet,” Rand said. “It just means we have to drill down on these things and understand how the various genes that affect aging interact with one another. If you get the right combination of genes, you might be able to map a two-gene response to different diets right down to individual molecules ‘talking to each other’ in different ways.”

The National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of General Medicine supported the work.