Scientists work out the effects of intensive, regular physical exercise at the cellular level

Apparently, the health benefits of intensive physical exercise are much more extensive throughout the whole body  than previously known!

This is a massive study! Very interesting are the discovered sex differences!

"... new research shows that the body’s response to exercise is more complex and far-reaching than previously thought. In a study on rats, a team of scientists from across the United States has found that physical activity causes many cellular and molecular changes in all 19 of the organs they studied in the animals. ...

In all, the teams performed nearly 10,000 assays to make about 15 million measurements on blood and 18 solid tissues. They found that exercise impacted thousands of molecules, with the most extreme changes in the adrenal gland, which produces hormones that regulate many important processes such as immunity, metabolism, and blood pressure. The researchers uncovered sex differences in several organs, particularly related to the immune response over time. Most immune-signaling molecules unique to females showed changes in levels between one and two weeks of training, whereas those in males showed differences between four and eight weeks. ..."

From the abstract:

"Regular exercise promotes whole-body health and prevents disease, but the underlying molecular mechanisms are incompletely understood. Here, the ...  profiled the temporal transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, lipidome, phosphoproteome, acetylproteome, ubiquitylproteome, epigenome and immunome in whole blood, plasma and 18 solid tissues in male and female Rattus norvegicus over eight weeks of endurance exercise training. The resulting data compendium encompasses 9,466 assays across 19 tissues, 25 molecular platforms and 4 training time points. Thousands of shared and tissue-specific molecular alterations were identified, with sex differences found in multiple tissues. Temporal multi-omic and multi-tissue analyses revealed expansive biological insights into the adaptive responses to endurance training, including widespread regulation of immune, metabolic, stress response and mitochondrial pathways. Many changes were relevant to human health, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular health and tissue injury and recovery. The data and analyses presented in this study will serve as valuable resources for understanding and exploring the multi-tissue molecular effects of endurance training ..."

Scientists work out the effects of exercise at the cellular level | Broad Institute Prolonged physical activity in rats results in profound changes to RNA, proteins, and metabolites in nearly all tissues, providing clues to many human health conditions.

Temporal dynamics of the multi-omic response to endurance exercise training (open access)

Fig. 1: Summary of the study design and multi-omics dataset.