Matching Dietary Amino Acid Balance to the In Silico-Translated Exome Optimizes Growth and Reproduction without Cost to Lifespan

Abstract

Balancing the quantity and quality of dietary protein relative to other nutrients is a key determinant of evolutionary fitness. A theoretical framework for defining a balanced diet would both reduce the enormous workload to optimize diets empirically and represent a breakthrough toward tailoring diets to the needs of consumers. Here, we report a simple and powerful in silico technique that uses the genome information of an organism to define its dietary amino acid requirements. We show for the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster that such "exome-matched" diets are more satiating, enhance growth, and increase reproduction relative to non-matched diets. Thus, early life fitness traits can be enhanced at low levels of dietary amino acids that do not impose a cost to lifespan. Exome matching also enhanced mouse growth, indicating that it can be applied to other organisms whose genome sequence is known.

Keywords: Drosophila; amino acids; diet balance; dietary restriction; fitness; growth; lifespan; mouse; reproduction; trade-off.