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Priority Research Paper|Volume 1, Issue 11|pp 903—936

Drosophila melanogaster p53 has developmental stage-specific and sex-specific effects on adult life span indicative of sexual antagonistic pleiotropy

Morris Waskar1, Gary N. Landis1, Jie Shen1, Christina Curtis1,2, Kevin Tozer1, Diana Abdueva1,3, Dmitriy Skvortsov1,4, Simon Tavaré1,2, John Tower1
  • 1Molecular and Computational Biology Program, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2910, USA
  • 2Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre, Robinson Way Cambridge CB2 0RE, England
  • 3Current address: Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-9034, USA
  • 4Current address: Department of Human Genetics, UCLA School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
  • 5Current address: Unilever Research Center, Bangalore 560066, India
Received: September 24, 2009Accepted: October 26, 2009Published: October 27, 2009

Copyright: © 2009 Waskar et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Truncated and mutant forms ofp53 affect life span in Drosophila, nematodes and mice, however the role of wild-type p53 in aging remains unclear. Here conditional over-expression of both wild-type and mutant p53 transgenes indicated that, in adult flies, p53 limits life span in females but favors life span in males. In contrast, during larval development, moderate over-expression of p53 produced both male and female adults with increased life span. Mutations of the endogenous p53 gene also had sex-specific effects on life span under control and stress conditions: null mutation of p53 increased life span in females, and had smaller, more variable effects in males. These developmental stage-specific and sex-specific effects of p53 on adult life span are consistent with a sexual antagonistic pleiotropy model.