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Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 11|pp 3260—3272

Overexpression of CBS and CSE genes affects lifespan, stress resistance and locomotor activity in Drosophila melanogaster

Mikhail Shaposhnikov1,2, Ekaterina Proshkina2, Lyubov Koval2, Nadezhda Zemskaya2, Alex Zhavoronkov3, Alexey Moskalev1,2,4
  • 1Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 119991, Russia
  • 2Institute of Biology of Komi Science Center of Ural Branch of RAS, Syktyvkar 167982, Russia
  • 3Insilico Medicine, Inc, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
  • 4Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny 141700, Russia
Received: September 15, 2018Accepted: October 28, 2018Published: November 8, 2018
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101630

Copyright: © 2018 Shaposhnikov et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Recent experimental studies highlighted the role of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in aging and longevity. The cystathionine ß-synthase (CBS) and cystathionine γ-lyase (CSE) are the key enzymes responsible for H2S production. Here we investigated the geroprotective effects of CSE and CBS overexpression in Drosophila. Overexpression of CSE did not affect a lifespan and decrease (mitochondrial form of CSE) or increase (cytoplasmic form of CSE) age dynamics of locomotor activity, while overexpression of CBS increase median (by 12.5%) and maximum (by 6.9%) lifespan and locomotor activity. Increasing of both CSE and CBS expression levels resulted in thermotolerance, but the resistance to combination of arid and food-free conditions decreased. The resistance to oxidative stress (paraquat) was not affected in flies with overexpression of CBS and cytoplasmic CSE, but decreased in flies overexpressing mitochondrial form of CSE. Thus, transgene overexpression of the CSE and CBS in Drosophila induce similar effects on stress-resistance and locomotor activity, however lifespan extending effect was revealed for CBS overexpression only.