Project description:Exercise exerts a wide range of beneficial effects for healthy physiology. However, the mechanisms regulating an individual's motivation to engage in physical activity remain incompletely understood. An important factor stimulating the engagement in both competitive and recreational exercise is the motivating pleasure derived from prolonged physical activity, which is triggered by exercise induced neurochemical changes in the brain. Here, we report on the discovery of a gut brain connection in mice that enhances exercise performance by augmenting dopamine signalling during physical activity. We find that microbiome dependent production of endocannabinoid metabolites in the gut stimulates the activity of TRPV1 expressing sensory neurons and thereby elevates dopamine levels in the ventral striatum during exercise. Stimulation of this pathway improves running performance, whereas microbiome depletion, peripheral endocannabinoid receptor inhibition, ablation of spinal afferent neurons or dopamine blockade abrogate exercise capacity. These findings indicate that the rewarding properties of exercise are influenced by gut derived interoceptive circuits and provide a microbiome dependent explanation for interindividual variability in exercise performance. Our study also suggests that interoceptomimetic molecules that stimulate the transmission of gut derived signals to the brain may enhance the motivation for exercise.
Project description:Short-term treadmill exercise does not overcome the effects of cafeteria diet on fecal microbiome while altering adipose and hypothalamic gene expression in rats
Project description:The processes of adaptation to environmental heat and aerobic exercise training improve efficiency in various body systems and bring about acclimatory homeostasis. In order to examine the global genomic responses of the soleus and heart following exposure of rats to these stressors, nylon cDNA Atlas Array was used. Male rats were exposed to one of the following stressors: heat acclimation, aerobic training (treadmill), and combined heat acclimation and aerobic training for short (2, 3 days) and long (1 mo) time period. The study comprised seven experimental groups: Controls-untreated. Heat acclimated groups (2dac, Acc)â exposure to environmental heat at 34C for 2 or 30 days. Exercise groups (3dex, Ex)â graduated training protocol under normothermic conditions for 3 and 30 days at 24C. Exercise training and heat acclimation â (3dexac, ExAc)- exposed to both environmental heat and aerobic exercise as above. The Series data tables appended below: 1) Heart - normalized log2 ratio of geomeans defined as treatment/control 2) Soleus - normalized log2 ratio of geomeans defined as treatment/control 21 samples, 3 pool each, of: 1)Â Control untreated rats 2)Â Long-term heat acclimated rats 3)Â Long-term aerobic-exercised trained rats. 4)Â Rats exposed to long-term heat acclimation and exercise training. 5)Â Short term heat acclimated rats. 6)Â Short term aerobic exercised trained rats 7)Â Rats exposed to short-term heat acclimation and exercise training.
Project description:Exercise stimulates systemic and tissue-specific adaptations that protect against lifestyle related diseases including obesity and type 2 diabetes. Exercise places high mechanical and energetic demands on contracting skeletal muscle, which require finely-tuned protein post-translational modifications involving signal transduction (e.g. phosphorylation) to elicit appropriate short- and long-term adaptive responses. To uncover the breadth of protein phosphorylation events underlying the adaptive responses to endurance exercise and skeletal muscle contraction, we performed global, unbiased mass spectrometry-based phosphoproteomic analyses of skeletal muscle from two rodent models, in situ muscle contraction in rats and treadmill-based endurance exercise in mice.
Project description:Cardiac dysfunction often arises during the early stages of cancer cachexia, posing a significant complication of the disease. Physical fitness is commonly recommended in these early stages of cancer cachexia due to its beneficial impacts on various aspects of the condition, including cardiac dysfunction. However, the direct functional impacts of exercise on the heart during cancer cachexia largely remain unexplored. In this study, we induced cancer cachexia in mice using a metastatic B16F10 melanoma model. Concurrently, these mice underwent a physical exercise regimen to investigate its potential role in cardiac function during cachexia. Our findings indicate that exercise training can help prevent metastatic melanoma-induced muscle loss without significant alterations to body and fat weight. Moreover, exercise improved the melanoma-induced decline in ejection fraction and fractional shortening, while also mitigating the increase in high-sensitive cardiac troponin T levels caused by metastatic melanoma in mice. Transcriptome analysis revealed that exercise significantly reversed the transcriptional alterations in the heart induced by melanoma, which were primarily enriched in pathways related to heart contraction. These results suggest that exercise can improve systolic heart function and directly influence the transcriptome of the heart during metastatic melanoma-induced cachexia.
Project description:Fish species display huge differences in physical activity ranging from lethargy to migration of thousands of miles, making them an interesting model for human exercise. Here, we show a remarkable plasticity of zebrafish in response to exercise and induction of PGC1α (encoded by PPARGC1A), a dominant regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis. Forced expression of human PPARGC1A induces mitochondrial biogenesis, an exercise-like gene expression signature, and physical fitness comparable to wild-type animals trained in counter-current swim tunnels. We quantify a stoichiometric induction of the electron transport chain (ETC) in response to exercise or PGC1α expression, identified by a proteomic SWATH-MS workflow. Exercise or PGC1α expression induce the re-organization of the ETC into respiratory supercomplexes, and we show that ndufa4/ndufa4l, previously assigned to complex I, associates to free and supramolecular complex IV in vivo. Thus, zebrafish is a useful and experimentally tractable vertebrate model to study exercise biology, including ETC expression and assembly.
Project description:The leg of healthy volunteers was locally deconditioned using three weeks of unilateral lower limb suspension (ULLS). The extremely deconditioned legs of subjects with a spinal cord injury (SCI) were trained using eight weeks of functional electrical stimulation (FES) exercise, 2-3 times per week (total 20 sessions). These models for local (in)activity were used to study changes in gene expression level of: A) Long-term deconditioning: before FES versus before ULLS (=SCI versus control); B) Short-term deconditioning: after ULLS versus before ULLS; and C) Exercise training: after FES versus before FES. RNA was isolated from six healthy subjects before and after ULLS deconditioning, and three subjects with SCI before and after FES exercise training.
Project description:We wanted to infer the contribution of host vs symbiotic microbiota plasticities on thermal acclimation of the holobiont. We long-term acclimated anymals of the same clonal line to 3 different temperatures (15, 20 and 25°C) and monitored along time the changes in fitness, microbiota composition, and host transcriptome.
Project description:The leg of healthy volunteers was locally deconditioned using three weeks of unilateral lower limb suspension (ULLS). The extremely deconditioned legs of subjects with a spinal cord injury (SCI) were trained using eight weeks of functional electrical stimulation (FES) exercise, 2-3 times per week (total 20 sessions). These models for local (in)activity were used to study changes in gene expression level of: A) Long-term deconditioning: before FES versus before ULLS (=SCI versus control); B) Short-term deconditioning: after ULLS versus before ULLS; and C) Exercise training: after FES versus before FES.
Project description:Comparison of gene expression profiles from Mus musculus cerebral hemisphere after physical exercise (treadmill; endurance training over 4 weeks). The RNA-seq data comprise4 groups: 2 age groups, each w/ and w/o physical exercise. Jena Centre for Systems Biology of Ageing - JenAge (www.jenage.de)