The short lifespan (about 3 wk) makes C. elegans a desirable model with which to assess exercise effects over the entire adult lifetime. C. elegans reach adulthood in ∼2.5 d and self-reproduce for approximately the first 6 d of adult life (7). The reduction in reproductive capacity is accompanied by age-related decline in multiple tissues and funct...
We have shown previously that swimming in a liquid environment is more energetically demanding for C. elegans than the crawling motion on agar plates used in standard laboratory growth protocols (13). Moreover, we showed that a single 90-min C. elegans swim session induces key features of mammalian exercise, namely locomotory fatigue, muscle mitoch...
Here, we report on the optimization of a long-term swim exercise protocol for C. elegans and establish that multiple daily swim sessions are essential for exercise adaptation that includes increased muscle gene expression, improved locomotory performance, and enhanced maintenance of the muscle mitochondrial network. Whole-animal parameters, such as...
We tested long-term exercise regimens with swim frequencies of 1 session per day (1+1+1+1), 2 sessions per day (2+2+2+2), 3 sessions per day on the first 2 d of adulthood plus 2 sessions per day on the third and fourth adult days (3+3+2+2), 3 sessions per day (3+3+3+3), and 4 sessions per day (4+4+4+4) (Fig. 1B). The exercise adaptation readouts we...
In mammals, long-term endurance exercise leads to profound transcriptional changes at the muscle level, with up-regulation of muscle structural genes, such as troponins, tropomyosins, myosin light chains, and myosin heavy chains, as one of the reproducible changes (21–23). T
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