ABSTRACT
Adaptations to infectious and dietary pressures shape mammalian physiology and disease risk. How such adaptations affect sex-biased diseases remains understudied. Here, we show that sex-dependent hepatic gene programs confer a robust (~300%) survival advantage for male mice during lethal bacterial infection. The transcription factor BCL6, which masculinizes hepatic gene expression at puberty, is essential for this advantage. However, protection by BCL6 comes at a cost during conditions of dietary excess, resulting in overt fatty liver and glucose intolerance in males. Deleting hepatic BCL6 reverses these phenotypes but markedly lowers male survival during infection, thus establishing a sex-dependent tradeoff between host defense and metabolic systems. Our findings offer strong evidence that some current sex-biased diseases are rooted in ancient evolutionary trade-offs between immunity and metabolism.
Accepted 8/29/22 Science