Laboratory rats and their exercise treadmills may hold the molecular answer to the health benefits of physical activity for humans.
As part of the National Institutes of Health-funded Physical Activity Molecular Transducer Consortium (MoTrPAC), UF Health researchers published preclinical research in Nature that expands our understanding of the biology behind exercise.
MoTrPAC brings together scientists in physiology, genetics, and more across 23 national research institutions to study the molecular changes that occur in the human body during physical activity that lead to better health outcomes, including lower risk of diabetes, cancer, and health conditions. We aim to find out. Heart disease.
The project's principal investigator, Dr. Karin Esser, is chair of the Department of Physiology and Aging at the University of Florida School of Medicine and leads the preclinical facility at the University of Florida, with two other facilities at the University of Iowa and Harvard University. is set up.
The health benefits of physical activity are well-documented. Exercise improves the health of your heart and immune system, while lowering your odds of some cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. However, questions remain as to why.
“It's simple. We know being active is healthy. But when it comes to the molecular mechanisms that support our overall health, it's not clear,” Esser said. Ta. “We don't know all the organs involved, we don't know all the pathways of movement or molecular targets. The goal of this first series of studies is to be very descriptive, but very It was profound.”
Setting out to build the molecular map, Esser and her UF cohort studied changes in 19 different tissues in male and female rats after 1, 2, 4, and 8 weeks of exercise training. This project went beyond assessing skeletal muscle and bone tissue and looked closely at effects on the lungs, spleen, intestines, and more.
Treadmill training was designed to mimic the endurance training that humans may perform during the ongoing MoTrPAC clinical study. Rats ran on a treadmill for 40 minutes to 1 hour five mornings a week. After each training session, they refilled with food, drinks and rested.
Overall, 35,439 biological features were shown to change after exercise training, representing changes in proteins, genes, and metabolites in all tissues and time points. Briefly, all tissues and organs responded to exercise training in male and female rats, and these changes were seen across many different molecular markers.
Scientists also discovered changes that may apply to human diseases, including significant molecular adaptations in the small intestine and colon of male and female rats after eight weeks of training, which are linked to irritable bowel syndrome. Suggests the benefits of exercise for enteritis. They also found that about half of the adrenal mitochondrial genes undergo expression changes in response to endurance training. The study also highlighted sex-specific differences in response to exercise training, with women's adrenal glands showing opposite changes in hormonal pathways compared to men.
Collaboration with the NIH continues and human experiments are being conducted to study the health benefits of exercise. At this time, the work of UF Health researchers and other contributors can be found in his publicly available MoTrPAC data repository, enabling further discoveries.
“Exercise is an incredibly powerful physiological stimulus for human health,” Esser says. “Understanding its potential for health maintenance and disease prevention is critically needed, not only for intervention studies but also to support future drug design and treatments.”
