“Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” Malene Lindholm, a graduate student who led the study said, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”
We all know that exercise reduces our risk of diabetes and heart disease, let alone weight loss, but what’s really going on underneath it all? A new study explains that this kind of activity actually changes the shape and function of our genes.
It’s not a simple task to understand the function of the human genome, but what we do know is that genes turn off and on based on biochemical signals from the body. When switched on, proteins activate physiological responses in different areas of the body. Even though it’s common knowledge for scientists that this on/off switch exists, it hasn’t been clearly understood how physical exercise affects this.
Thats where epigenetics comes in – a process where the operation of genes is affected, but DNA stays the same. The New York Times took a deeper look into this physiological response:
Epigenetic changes occur on the outside of the gene, mainly through a process called methylation. In methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body.
Scientists know that methylation patterns change in response to lifestyle. Eating certain diets or being exposed to pollutants, for instance, can change methylation patterns on some of the genes in our DNA and affect what proteins those genes express. Depending on which genes are involved, it may also affect our health and risk for disease.
One of the reasons that the research is kind of complicated is that in our daily lives, with all kinds of activities, methylation patterns shift, so it’s difficult to isolate activity like when someone exercises.
But in a study published this month in Epigenetics, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm recruited 23 young and healthy men and women and “overturned that obstacle by the simple expedient of having their volunteers bicycle using only one leg, leaving the other unexercised. In effect, each person became his or her own control group. Both legs would undergo methylation patterns influenced by his or her entire life; but only the pedaling leg would show changes related to exercise,” The New York Times reported.
Using sophisticated genomic analysis, the researchers determined that more than 5,000 sites on the genome of muscle cells from the exercised leg now featured new methylation patterns. Some showed more methyl groups; some fewer. But the changes were significant and not found in the unexercised leg.
Interestingly, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied.
Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
