Subterranean Fishes of the World

5573

2020

Royal Society Open Science

7(2):191853

Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4854348

© 2020 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited

Astyanax mexicanus has gained importance as a laboratory model organism for evolutionary biology. However, little is known about its intermediary metabolism, and feeding regimes remain variable between laboratories holding this species. We thus aimed to evaluate the intermediary metabolism response to nutritional status and to low (NC) or high (HC) carbohydrate diets in various organs of the surface-dwelling form of the species. As expected, glycaemia increased after feeding. Fish fed the HC diet had higher glycaemia than fish fed the NC diet, but without displaying hyperglycaemia, suggesting that carbohydrates are efficiently used as an energy source. At molecular level, only fasn (Fatty Acid Synthase) transcripts increased in tissues after refeeding, suggesting an activation of lipogenesis. On the other hand, we monitored only moderate changes in glucoserelated transcripts. Most changes observed were related to the nutritional status, but not to the NC versus HC diet. Such a metabolic pattern is suggestive of an omnivorousrelated metabolism, and this species, at least at adult stage, may adapt to a fish meal-substituted diet with high carbohydrate content and low protein supply. Investigation to identify molecular actors explaining the efficient use of such a diet should be pursued to deepen our knowledge on this species.

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