Abstract
While many studies have focused on the detrimental effects of advanced maternal age and harmful prenatal environments on progeny, little is known about the role of beneficial non-Mendelian maternal inheritance on aging. Here, we report the effects of maternal age and maternal caloric restriction (CR) on the life span and health span of offspring for a clonal culture of the monogonont rotifer Brachionus manjavacas. Mothers on regimens of chronic CR (CCR) or intermittent fasting (IF) had increased life span compared with mothers fed ad libitum (AL). With increasing maternal age, life span and fecundity of female offspring of AL-fed mothers decreased significantly and life span of male offspring was unchanged, whereas body size of both male and female offspring increased. Maternal CR partially rescued these effects, increasing the mean life span of AL-fed female offspring but not male offspring and increasing the fecundity of AL-fed female offspring compared with offspring of mothers of the same age. Both maternal CR regimens decreased male offspring body size, but only maternal IF decreased body size of female offspring, whereas maternal CCR caused a slight increase. Understanding the genetic and biochemical basis of these different maternal effects on aging may guide effective interventions to improve health span and life span.
Highlights
Interventions to improve health span and increase longevity rely on plasticity in age-related traits and life span
We subjected mothers to either chronic caloric restriction (CCR) at 10% of ad libitum (AL) food levels (a 90% reduction in food) or to intermittent fasting (IF) by feeding AL and starving on alternate days using standard protocols
The mean and maximum life span of female offspring decreased with increasing maternal age, with older mothers producing significantly shorter-lived offspring than younger mothers (Figs 1 and 2)
Summary
Interventions to improve health span and increase longevity rely on plasticity in age-related traits and life span. Such plasticity may evolve as an adaptive response to environmental heterogeneity or may be an indirect outcome of changing resources and stressors. CR may cause a hormetic response, resulting in upregulation of protective mechanisms to defend against the stress of limited food, secondarily resulting in increased longevity (Masoro, 2007). Transgenerational phenotypic plasticity, the influence of the maternal environment on the phenotype of offspring, known as maternal effects, may be detrimental or beneficial to progeny fitness. A maternal effect known to impact offspring fitness is the age at which mothers give birth. In many plant and animal species, older mothers have shorter-lived offspring, a phenomenon called the ‘Lansing effect’ (Lansing, 1947; Priest et al, 2002)
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