Study Untangles Mitochondria – The Energy Powerhouse of Our Cells – To Reap Rewards of Exercise

New research has uncovered how mitochondria, our cells’ powerhouse implicated in devastating mitochondrial diseases, type 2 diabetes and cancers, respond to physical training in unprecedented detail.

A joint study between the University of Melbourne and the University of Victoria, with collaborators from the German Diabetes Centre, Monash University and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, has successfully linked minutes of exercise to specific mitochondrial changes that support improved metabolism. .

In work published in nature communications Recently, Dr. Stroud of the University of Melbourne’s School of Biomedical Sciences and colleagues detail how they used state-of-the-art equipment in the School of Proteomics and Mass Spectrometry at the University of Melbourne’s Bio21 Institute of Biotechnology and Molecular Sciences to analyze in detail how our muscles respond to exercise.

While mitochondria are very important, converting sugars, fats, and proteins into energy used for muscle contraction, cell growth, and brain activity, among other things, maintaining mitochondrial health is critical not only to various debilitating disease states in which mitochondrial function is impaired, but also the quality of life of healthy people.

The team was able to discover ten times more mitochondrial proteins that respond to physical training than documented in previous studies.

“Some 726 of the proteins were identified, of which 185 were altered by exercise, but what we are most excited about is the breadth of the changes identified, as well as the method we developed to detect these changes. Previously, the research groups had looked at more mitochondria overall, but it didn’t assume a lot of changes, using our method we identified a never-before-seen complexity in the changes,” Dr. Stroud said.

“We hope that the method can now be applied to focused studies where we look at different types of exercise to elicit certain responses, for example increasing a certain function of mitochondria to counteract another function that may be defective in a patient with type 2 diabetes.” ”.

The new findings challenge current exercise recommendations and highlight the well-documented therapeutic benefits of physical training and how it can be optimized by increasing the amount of time we exercise.

Professor David Bishop of the University of Victoria and former President of Exercise and Sport Science Australia said: “Regular exercise is an inexpensive therapeutic intervention that can improve our quality of life. As about 20 percent of people do not derive any health benefit from current exercise guidelines, our findings may lead to different exercise recommendations aimed at improving mitochondrial function. We really want this knowledge to help health and exercise professionals design more personalized training interventions targeted at specific conditions where mitochondrial function is implicated.”

Reference: “High-Intensity Training Induces Nonstoichiometric Changes in the Human Skeletal Muscle Mitochondrial Proteome Without Reorganization of Respiratory Chain Contents” by Cesare Granata, Nikeisha J. Caruana, Javier Botella, Nicholas A. Jamnick, Kevin Huynh, Jujiao Kuang, Hans A. Janssen, Boris Reljic, Natalie A. Mellett, Adrienne Laskowski, Tegan L. Stait, Ann E. Frazier, Melinda T. Coughlan, Peter J. Meikle, David R. Thorburn, David A. Stroud, and David J. Bishop, December 3, 2021, nature communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27153-3