Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of Evolutionary Biology

Publication Date

Fall 11-1-2022

Keywords

carbohydrate, diet, experimental evolution, immunity, insect, protein

Abstract

Although dietary macronutrients are known to regulate insect immunity, few studies have examined their evolutionary effects. Here, we evaluate this relationship in the cricket Gryllodes sigillatus by maintaining replicate populations on four diets differing in protein (P) to carbohydrate (C) ratio (P‐ or C‐biased) and nutritional content (low‐ or high‐nutrition) for >37 generations. We split each population into two; one maintained on their evolution diet and the other switched to their ancestral diet. We also maintained populations exclusively on the ancestral diet (baseline). After three generations, we measured three immune parameters in males and females from each population. Immunity was higher on P‐biased than C‐biased diets and on low‐ versus high‐nutrition diets, although the latter was most likely driven by compensatory feeding. These patterns persisted in populations switched to their ancestral diet, indicating genetic divergence. Crickets evolving on C‐biased diets had lower immunity than the baseline, whereas their P‐biased counterparts had similar or higher immunity than the baseline, indicating that populations evolved with dietary manipulation. Although females exhibited superior immunity for all assays, the sexes showed similar immune changes across diets. Our work highlights the important role that macronutrient intake plays in the evolution of immunity in the sexes.

Funding Source

C.L. was supported by Higher Degree Research Funds allocated by WSU School of Science and a PhD Scholarship granted by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies. J.H. was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP180101708) and S.K.S, B.M.S and J.H. by the National Science Foundation (IOS 16‐54028).

Comments

First published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology (2022): https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.14093

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

DOI

10.1111/jeb.14093

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