Matching complex dietary landscapes with the signalling pathways that regulate life history traits

The rise in obesity in human populations has reinvigorated research focused on how nutrition impacts life history traits, including body size, lifespan, reproductive success, stress resistance and propensity for disease. Studies have ranged in their approach from identifying the molecular machinery responding to changes in nutrient levels, to understanding the hormonal changes that occur in response to diet, to mapping the response of differing life history traits over complex dietary landscapes. Connecting insights across these approaches presents significant challenges primarily because we lack information about how signalling pathways respond to dietary complexity. Here, we offer our perspective on how to integrate insights from the cellular to the whole organism to understand the regulation of life history traits.