Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

In most species in the animal kingdom, sex differences in developmental and physiological traits like lifespan, body size and immune response have been well-documented, but we lack mechanistic insight into these differences at a cellular level. I use Drosophila as a model system to investigate these sex differences because recent studies in flies have advanced our understanding of the sex-specific regulation of growth, cell signaling pathways, and metabolism. One study from 2022 called the Fly Cell Atlas Project, found that almost every cell type across development in Drosophila showed a female bias in ribosomal protein (Rp) genes with the larval fat body having the biggest female bias in Rp genes. We tested the cellular implications of this finding in the larval fat body and found that female cells had higher levels of protein synthesis even after accounting for the sex difference in cell size. To understand the metabolic effect that this bias has at a cellular level we acquired unbiased and untargeted RNAseq, metabolomic and lipidomic data from the larval fat body. Briefly, we find that female fat cells have higher levels of glucose metabolism, mitochondrial activity and some stress response pathways. Interestingly, my data finds that increased levels of some of these metabolic processes in females is driven by the female bias in protein synthesis levels. This has significant implications as it is possible that a sex difference in protein synthesis levels is a key driver for male-female differences in cellular metabolism. Additionally, as we investigate the source of these sex differences in cellular metabolism, we aim to tease apart sex determination pathway influence from sex chromosome influence. This research will build on the foundation of previous sex and gender research by introducing a new perspective to understand sex differences in cellular metabolism that can be tested in other cell types.