Abstract
Aging is the leading risk factor of human chronic diseases. Understanding of aging process and mechanisms facilitates drug development and the prevention of aging-related diseases. Although many aging studies focus on fruit fly as a canonical insect system, minimal attention is paid to the potentially significant roles of other insects in aging research. As the most diverse group of animals, insects provide many aging types and important complementary systems for aging studies. Insect polyphenism represents a striking example of the natural variation in longevity and aging rate. The extreme intraspecific variations in the lifespan of social insects offer an opportunity to study how aging is differentially regulated by social factors. Insect flight, as an extremely high-intensity physical activity, is suitable for the investigation of the complex relationship between metabolic rate, oxidative stress, and aging. Moreover, as a “non-aging” state, insect diapause not only slows aging process during diapause phase but also affects adult longevity during/after diapause. In the past two decades, considerable progress has been made in understanding the molecular basis of aging regulation in insects. Herein, the recent research progress in non-Drosophila insect aging was reviewed, and its potential utilization in aging in the future was discussed.
Highlights
Aging is regarded as the greatest risk factor of most chronic pathological conditions (Kennedy et al, 2014), and becoming a socioeconomic problem worldwide (He et al, 2016)
Substantial progress has been achieved in enhancing the understanding of the molecular basis of aging regulation in insect aging
Transcriptional differences are the most observed differences in aging-regulatory genes involved in endocrine regulation, oxidative stress responses, maintenance of telomere, and genomic stability (Amdam et al, 2005; Corona et al, 2007; Bonasio et al, 2010; Elsner et al, 2018)
Summary
Aging is regarded as the greatest risk factor of most chronic pathological conditions (Kennedy et al, 2014), and becoming a socioeconomic problem worldwide (He et al, 2016). Studies on fruit fly aging made remarkable contributions to the understanding of conserved aging-regulatory mechanisms, such as endocrine regulation (Toivonen and Partridge, 2009), oxidative stress (Le Bourg, 2001), epigenetic alterations (Solovev et al, 2018), mitochondrial dysfunctions (Guo, 2012), and genomic instability (Li et al, 2013). Only focusing on a few number of model species ignores the diversity of longevity and aging traits that have evolved in nature, and the diversity provides an opportunity to study various regulators and mechanisms involved in aging plasticity and senescence evolution (Valenzano et al, 2017). In the past two decades, advances in genomics, genetic manipulation, and gene editing technology enable the aging studies to approach the multiple phenotypes and molecular levels in the non-Drosophila insects. The recent advances in aging studies of non-Drosophila insects were discussed, and the special values of insects as model systems for aging biology were highlighted
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