Keywords: l. Insulin signaling/ insulin-like peptides; d. gonads
Senescence is the gradual decline of function with advancing age. For example, in humans aging increases risk of hearing and vision loss. Reproductive senescence, is specifically the deterioration in reproductive success with advancing age. Hormone signaling pathways such as the insulin and insulin-like growth factor-like signaling (IIS) have many roles in aging and other processes. The IIS pathway, for example, can modulate not only lifespan, but also reproductive output, growth, metabolism, and stress. It has also been suggested that this pathway is likely to play a role in reproductive senescence. However, most reproductive senescence studies have focused on only one sex, though both show reproductive senescence and there are important effects of male-female interactions, Similarly, while the role of the IIS network in aging is well-characterized, there are few studies that have investigated tissue and age specific differences in both sexes allowing a direct comparison of changes in IIS with age. In order to understand why reproductive aging commonly differs between the sexes, we investigated how aging impacts sexually dimorphic expression of reproductive senesence candidate genes in different tissues – including those in the IIS pathway and in the sex determination hierarchy. Somatic and gonadal tissues were collected from males and females in a time series spanning day 3 to day 42 (post eclosion). RNA seq analysis will reveal how males and females differ in expression changes with advancing age.