Physical Exercise Could Change the Way Our Genes Work and Promote Overall Health

Regular physical exercise has the potential to change the way your genes work, revealed new research. “Our findings provide a mechanism for the known beneficial effects of exercise. By connecting each enhancer with a gene, we further provide a list of direct targets that could mediate this effect,” says Professor Romain Barrès from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, the senior author of the research.

The scientists from the University of Copenhagen hypothesized that endurance exercise training remodels the activity of gene enhancers in skeletal muscle. Enhancers are the part of genes that control the activities of gene segments that produce proteins.

They enrolled young sedentary men under a six-week endurance exercise program. The team collected biopsy samples of the thigh muscles of participants both before and after the exercise program. They used these samples to map the genome-wide positions and activities of enhancers.

This showed the alterations in the structure of many enhancers in their skeletal muscle. Many of these enhancers have already been identified as hotspots of genetic variation between individuals that are associated with human disease.

Besides this, the team also opines that regular physical exercise can also trigger the synthesis of secreted muscle factors that exert beneficial effects on the organs distant from muscle, like the brain, as they found that exercise remodels enhancers that are linked to cognitive abilities.

“Our data provide evidence of a functional link between epigenetic rewiring of enhancers to control their activity after exercise training and the modulation of disease risk in humans,” says Kristine Williams, the lead author of this study.

Advertisement

The findings of the complete research study have been published in Molecular Metabolism .

Source-Medindia