Endurance exercise protects aging Drosophila from high-salt diet(HSD)-induced climbing capacity decline and lifespan decrease by enhancing antioxidant capacity

Abstract

A high-salt diet(HSD) is a major cause of many chronic and age-related defects such as myocardial hypertrophy, locomotor impairment, and mortality. Exercise training can efficiently prevent and treat many chronic and age-related diseases. However, it remains unclear whether endurance exercise can resist HSD-induced the impairment of climbing capacity and longevity in aging individuals. In here, flies were taken exercise training and fed a HSD from 1-week old to 5-week old. Overexpression or knockdown of salt and dFOXO were built by UAS/Gal4 system. The results showed that a HSD, salt gene overexpression, and dFOXO knockdown significantly reduced climbing endurance, climbing index, survival, dFOXO expression, and SOD activity level, and increased MDA level in aging flies. Inversely, in a HSD aging flies, endurance exercise and dFOXO overexpression significantly increased their climbing ability, lifespan, and antioxidant capacity, but they did not significantly change the salt gene expression. On the whole, current results indicated that a HSD accelerated the age-related decline of climbing capacity and mortality via up regulating salt expression and inhibiting dFOXO/SOD pathway. Increased dFOXO/SOD pathway activity played a key role in mediating endurance exercise resistance to the low salt tolerance-induced impairment of climbing capacity and longevity in aging Drosophila.