The Effects of Age and Reproduction on the Lipidome of Caenorhabditis elegans

Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2019 May 9:2019:5768953. doi: 10.1155/2019/5768953. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Aging is a complex life process, and a unified view is that metabolism plays key roles in all biological processes. Here, we determined the lipidomic profile of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) using ultraperformance liquid chromatography high-resolution mass spectrometry (UPLC-HRMS). Using a nontargeted approach, we detected approximately 3000 species. Analysis of the lipid metabolic profiles at young adult and ten-day-old ages among wild-type N2, glp-1 defective mutant, and double mutant daf-16;glp-1 uncovered significant age-related differences in the total amount of phosphatidylcholines (PC), sphingomyelins (SM), ceramides (Cer), diglycerides (DG), and triglycerides (TG). In addition, the age-associated lipid profiles were characterized by ratio of polyunsaturated (PUFA) over monounsaturated (MUFA) lipid species. Lipid metabolism modulation plays an important role in reproduction-regulated aging; to identify the variations of lipid metabolites during germ line loss-induced longevity, we investigated the lipidomic profiles of long-lived glp-1/notch receptor mutants, which have reproductive deficiency when grown at nonpermissive temperature. The results showed that there was some age-related lipid variation, including TG 40:2, TG 40:1, and TG 41:1, which contributed to the long-life phenotype. The longevity of glp-1 mutant was daf-16-dependent; the lipidome analysis of daf-16;glp-1 double mutant revealed that the changes of some metabolites in the glp-1 mutant were daf-16-dependent, while other metabolites displayed more complex epistatic patterns. We first conducted a comprehensive lipidome analysis to provide novel insights into the relationships between longevity and lipid metabolism regulated by germ line signals in C. elegans.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Caenorhabditis elegans / growth & development
  • Caenorhabditis elegans / metabolism*
  • Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins / metabolism*
  • Lipids / analysis*
  • Longevity*
  • Reproduction*
  • Signal Transduction*

Substances

  • Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins
  • Lipids