A father\u2019s diet before sex can play as important a role as nutrition of the expectant mother in delivering a healthy baby, new research suggests.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were really surprised,\u201d said Michal Polak, a Professor at the University of Cincinnati in the US. \u201cIn many species, the moms do a lot of the<\/p>\n
care. So we expect there to be an effect of maternal diet on offspring because of that strong link. But it was a real surprise to find a link<\/p>\n
between paternal diet and offspring,\u201d Polak said.<\/p>\n
For the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers manipulated the nutrition of male fruit flies and<\/p>\n
observed a strong correlation between poor diet and poor survivorship among their offspring. Scientists regularly study fruit flies because they<\/p>\n
share 60 per cent of our genes and more than 75 per cent of our disease genes.<\/p>\n
Geneticists have mapped their entire genome. More than 150 years of study have made this unassuming little fly a good model system, Polak<\/p>\n
said.<\/p>\n
For the Polak isolated females and males of the fruit fly species Drosophila melanogaster, which is famous for its enormous red eyes and high<\/p>\n
reproductive capacity. A single fly can lay 50 eggs per day or as many as 2,000 eggs in her short two-month lifetime.<\/p>\n
The researchers fed females the same diet. But they fed males 30 different diets of yeast and sugars. The flies could eat all they wanted from<\/p>\n
the agar mixture in the bottom of their glass beaker homes, but the quality of the food varied dramatically from low to high concentrations of<\/p>\n
proteins, carbohydrates and calories.<\/p>\n
After 17 days on the strict diet, the males were mated individually and consecutively with two females, which all received the same diet of<\/p>\n
yeasted cornmeal. The researchers found that embryos from the second mating were more likely to survive as their fathers\u2019 diets improved in<\/p>\n
nutrition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A father\u2019s diet before sex can play as important a role as nutrition of the expectant mother in delivering a healthy baby, new research suggests. \u201cWe were really surprised,\u201d said Michal Polak, a Professor at the University of Cincinnati in the US. \u201cIn many species, the moms do a lot of the care. So we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7735,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7736,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7734\/revisions\/7736"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}