Drosophila larvae lacking the bcl-2 gene, buffy, are sensitive to nutrient stress, maintain increased basal target of rapamycin (Tor) signaling and exhibit characteristics of altered basal energy metabolism

Table 1 buffy mutant larvae maintain smaller steady-state lipid and glycogen stores

	Wild-type	buffy ^H37	buffy ^H37 /wt
Complete medium:
Nile Red fat body (mean luminosity)	62.4 ± 3.6 (3)	50.4 ± 2.5 (3)	0.81
Nile Red lysate (FU)	323 ± 47 (4)	260 ± 16 (4)	0.80
Triacylglyceride (μg TAG/μg protein)	0.56 ± 0.05 (4)	0.47 ± 0.04 (4)	0.85
Glycogen (ng glycogen/μg protein)	1.54 ± 0.16 (6)	1.30 ± 0.11 (5)	0.85
20% medium:
Nile Red fat body (mean luminosity)	62.2 ± 15.5 (3)	46.3 ± 1.6 (3)	0.74
Number of lipid droplets/fat body cell	30.7 ± 5.3 (3)	20.7 ± 3.4 (3)	0.67
Perimeter of lipid droplets	38.9 ± 3.4 (3)	32.3 ± 2.2 (3)	0.83
Complete medium + added sucrose:
Triacylglyceride (μg TAG/μg protein)	0.87 ± 0.07 (4)	0.74 ± 0.10 (4)	0.85

All experiments were performed on third instar larvae fed the indicated medium. All data are presented as averages ± SEM with number of biological replicates in parentheses. With the exception of mean luminosity of Nile Red fat body in complete medium (P = 0.05), all other differences are not significant (P > 0.1) as determined by Student's unpaired two-tailed t test. Nevertheless, the trend is similar across all measurements. For TAG assays, a representative of four biological replicates is presented. For technical reasons the mean luminosity cannot be compared across different media conditions (see Methods for experimental details).

ISSN: 1741-7007