Exercise reduces the risk of many diseases, but scientists still do not fully understand how exercise changes the body at a molecular level.
The health benefits of exercise are well known, but new research shows that the body’s response to exercise is more complex and far-reaching than previously thought.
In a study with rats, a team of scientists from across the United States found that physical activity causes many cellular and molecular changes in the 19 organs they studied in the animals.
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Exercise reduces the risk of many diseases, but scientists still do not fully understand how exercise changes the body at a molecular level. Most studies have focused on a single organ, sex, or time point, and only include one or two types of data.
To get a more complete look at the biology of exercise, scientists at the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) used a series of techniques in the laboratory to analyze molecular changes in rats as they underwent weeks of intense exercise. findings appear in ‘Nature’.
The team studied a variety of animal tissues, including the heart, brain and lungs. They found that each of the organs they looked at changed with exercise, helping the body regulate the immune system, respond to stress, and control pathways connected to inflammatory liver disease, heart disease, and tissue injury.
The data provides potential clues about many different human health conditions; For example, researchers found a possible explanation for why the liver becomes less fatty during exercise, which could help in the development of new treatments for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
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The team hopes that one day their findings can be used to tailor exercise to an individual’s health status or to develop treatments that mimic the effects of physical activity in people who cannot exercise. They have already begun studies in people to track the molecular effects of exercise.
Launched in 2016, MoTrPAC brings together scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Stanford University, the National Institutes of Health (all in the United States), and other institutions to shed light on the biological processes underlying the benefits of exercise. to health.
The Broad project was originally conceived by Steve Carr, senior director of the Broad Proteomics Platform; Clary Clish, senior director of Broad’s Metabolomics Platform; Robert Gerszten, Broad senior associate fellow and chief of cardiovascular medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and Christopher Newgard, professor of nutrition at Duke University.
“It took a village of scientists with diverse scientific backgrounds to generate and integrate the enormous amount of high-quality data produced,” said Carr, co-lead author of the study.
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“This is the first whole-body map that analyzes the effects of training on multiple different organs. “The resource produced will be enormously valuable and has already yielded many potentially novel biological insights for further exploration.”
The team has made all the animal data available in a public online repository. Other scientists can use this site to download, for example, information about the proteins that change in abundance in the lungs of female rats after eight weeks of regular exercise on a treadmill, or the RNA response to exercise in all organs of the body. male and female rats for more than eight weeks.
In total, the teams performed almost 10,000 tests to make around 15 million measurements in blood and 18 solid tissues. They found that exercise impacted thousands of molecules, with the most extreme changes in the adrenal gland, which produces hormones that regulate many important processes such as immunity, metabolism and blood pressure.
The researchers discovered sex differences in several organs, particularly related to immune response over time.
Most of the immune signaling molecules unique to women showed changes in levels between one and two weeks of training, while those from men showed differences between four and eight weeks.
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Some responses were consistent between sexes and organs. For example, the researchers found that heat shock proteins, which are produced by cells in response to stress, were regulated in the same way in different tissues. But other knowledge was specific to each tissue.
To their surprise, Carr’s team found an increase in the acetylation of mitochondrial proteins involved in energy production and in a phosphorylation signal that regulates energy storage, both in the liver that changed during exercise.
These changes could help make the liver less fatty and less prone to disease with exercise, and could give researchers a target for future treatments of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
“Although the liver is not directly involved in exercise, it still undergoes changes that could improve health. “No one speculated that we would see these acetylation and phosphorylation changes in the liver after training,” the researchers note.
“This highlights why we implement all these different molecular modalities: exercise is a very complex process and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” they concluded.
With information from Europa Press
