Abstract
Studies of infection in Drosophila melanogaster provide insight into both mechanisms of host resistance and tolerance of pathogens. However, research into the pathways involved in these processes has been limited by the relatively few metrics that can be used to measure sickness and health throughout the course of infection. Here we report measurements of infection-related declines in flies' performance on two different behavioral assays. D. melanogaster are slower to recover from a chill-induced coma during infection with either Listeria monocytogenes or Streptococcus pneumoniae. L. monocytogenes infection also impacts flies' performance during a negative geotaxis assay, revealing a decline in their rate of climbing as part of their innate escape response after startle. In addition to providing new measures for assessing health, these assays also suggest pathological consequences of and metabolic shifts that may occur over the course of an infection.
Highlights
Infection can impact the health of an organism in complex ways
Infections were performed with Listeria monocytogenes strain 10403 S or Streptococcus pneumoniae strain SP1
We demonstrate a significant impairment in chill coma recovery during Listeria monocytogenes or Streptococcus pneumoniae infection
Summary
Infection can impact the health of an organism in complex ways. Direct damage to the host caused by pathogenic toxins, damage to host tissue resulting from immune effectors, and the energetic expense of responding to an infection are all known to affect the health of a host [1,2,3,4]. When D. melanogaster are bred in the presence of a microsporidian parasite, the animals have higher fecundity and longer lifespans in the presence of pathogen compared to controls not selected for parasite tolerance and resistance [11] These selected animals are less fit in low nutrient or competitive breeding environments where the pathogen is not present. Such assays are commonly used in the field of aging research in D. melanogaster, which has long recognized that measures of both healthspan and longevity are critical to understanding the biology of aging We hypothesized that these metrics could be used to assess health during infection because D. melanogaster shows an age-related up-regulation of inflammatory genes and expression patterns that characterize aging and the induction of an immune response in these animals are related [18]. We hypothesize that the physiological changes that cause performance deficits in both of these assays are affected by infection, such that both assays can be used to detect decreases in health during infection
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