Diet composition, especially the relative abundance of key macronutrients, is well known to affect animal wellbeing by changing reproductive output, metabolism and length of life. However, less attention has been paid to the ways the quality of these nutrients modify these macronutrient interactions. Nutritional Geometry can be used to model the effects of multiple dietary components on life-history traits and to compare these responses when diet quality is varied. Previous studies have shown that dietary protein quality can be increased for egg production in Drosophila melanogaster by matching the dietary amino acid proportions to the balance of amino acids used by the sum of proteins in the fly’s in silico translated exome. Here, we show that dietary protein quality dramatically alters the effect of protein quantity on female reproduction across a broad range of diets varying in both protein and carbohydrate concentrations. These data show that when sources of ingredients vary, their relative value to the consumer can vastly differ and yield very different physiological outcomes. Such variations could be particularly important for meta analyses that look to draw generalisable conclusions from diverse studies.

众所周知，饮食成分，尤其是关键常量营养素的相对丰度会通过改变生殖产量、新陈代谢和寿命来影响动物的健康。然而，很少有人关注这些营养素的质量改变这些常量营养素相互作用的方式。营养几何可用于模拟多种饮食成分对生活史特征的影响，并在饮食质量不同时比较这些反应。先前的研究表明，通过将膳食氨基酸比例与果蝇计算机中蛋白质总和所使用的氨基酸平衡相匹配，可以提高黑腹果蝇产蛋的膳食蛋白质质量翻译外显子组。在这里，我们表明，在蛋白质和碳水化合物浓度各不相同的各种饮食中，饮食蛋白质质量显着改变了蛋白质数量对雌性生殖的影响。这些数据表明，当成分来源不同时，它们对消费者的相对价值可能会有很大差异，并产生非常不同的生理结果。这种变化对于希望从不同研究中得出普遍结论的荟萃分析可能特别重要。