Analysing the Effect of High Sugar Diet on the Intestinal Stem in Drosophila Melanogaster

Abstract

Sugar-rich diets have long been associated with various metabolic disorders and pro- gressive tissue damage. However, the knowledge about the effect of high sugar diet (HSD) at the cellular level, particularly on Adult Stem Cells (ASCs), needs to be included. In con- trast to other ASCs, stem cells in the intestine, referred to as intestinal stem cells (ISCs), are highly proliferative because of the continuous shedding of differentiated cells from the tip of villi caused by the passage of food. In this study, we have addressed how dietary sugar impacts the posterior midgut of Drosophila melanogaster and whether those defects can be restored by replacing a high-sugar diet with a normal diet. We employed an established model of dietary sugar-induced type 2 diabetes mellitus in Drosophila. Our results demon- strate that the anatomical anomalies and reduction in the size of the gut epithelial cells, as observed upon rearing the flies on a high-sugar diet, get restored appreciably upon shifting the flies back to a normal diet. However, the drop in the number of Enteroendocrine cells (differentiated cell type) observed in the gut of flies reared on high sugar diet was not re- stored upon shifting the flies to a normal diet. Overall, our results demonstrate that HSD fed diabetic model of Drosophila is a functional system to understand the effect of an altered diet on the homeostasis of the ASCs.