As part of an ongoing national research effort to better understand how physical activity improves health and prevents disease, seven University of Colorado Department of Medicine faculty members contributed to an article recently published in Nature, an international journal of science.
The paper, “Temporal dynamics of the multi-omic response to endurance exercise training,” discusses how eight weeks of endurance exercise training affected male and female young adult rats. The researchers found that all bodily tissues that were tested responded to exercise training — even those not normally associated with movement. This means there were more than 35,000 biological molecules responding and adapting to endurance exercise over time. Researchers also found more widespread differences in molecular responses between male and female rats than they had originally expected.
Traditionally, research has focused on a single bodily tissue or has had a bias toward one sex. This research is unique because it is getting a comprehensive, organism-wide view of the impact of endurance exercise training for both female and male rats.
The research was conducted by the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC). This program, supported by the National Institutes of Health Common Fund, aims to identify exercise’s impact on the biological molecules of both animals and humans, with the goal of discovering how exercise improves and maintains the health of the body’s tissues and organs.
We asked Wendy Kohrt, PhD, a distinguished professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and a leader in the research effort, to discuss the need for this research, the long-term goals of the study, and her takeaways from the recent research paper. Kohrt is the chair of the executive and steering committees of MoTrPAC, as well as the principal investigator of one of the MoTrPAC clinical centers.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.