Abstract
Sirtuins are hypothesized to regulate cellular stress responses in marine mussels and previous research in the Tomanek lab has shown that sirtuin inhibitors affect mussels’recovery from environmentalstressors, including acute heatshock. These studies also suggest complex
interactions with diet, where well-fed mussels exposed
to sirtuin inhibitors and/or acute heat shock respond
differently than poorly fed mussels, at the protein and
whole-organism levels. While these imply a relationship
between sirtuins, food availability, and thermalsensitivity in Mytilid mussels, the direct effects of the sirtuin inhibitors nicotinamide and suramin on sirtuin activity or
their putative downstream effectors has never been explicitly tested. In this study, adult Mytilus californianus
were acclimated to a low or high food rations and then exposed to one of three treatments: acute heat shock, sirtuin inhibition, or acute heat shock and sirtuin inhibition. Gill tissue samples were taken at 2 time points
during the first 24-hours of recovery following treatment to measure variation in sirtuin activity, superoxide dismutase activity, and redox status of glutathione
relative to control mussels. My talk will discuss the interactions between ration and treatment on sirtuin activity, correlations between sirtuin activity and oxidative stress pathways in mussels, and the implications of these finding on our previous research.