Common Myelin Regulatory Factor Gene Variants Predisposing to Excellence in Sports.

Beata Pepłońska,Monika Michałowska-Sawczyn,Cezary Żekanowski,Kinga Humińska-Lisowska,Paweł Cięszczyk,Artur Gurgul,Jakub Grzegorz Adamczyk,Mariusz Berdyński,Agnieszka Fornal,Marcin Siewierski,Agata Piestrzynska-Kajtoch

doi:10.3390/genes12020262

Abstract

In all sport disciplines, excellent coordination of movements is crucial for achieving mastery. The ability to learn new motor skills quickly and effectively is dependent on efficient myelination which varies between individuals. It has been suggested that these differences may play a role in athletic performance. The process of myelination is under transcriptional control by Myelin Regulatory Factor (MYRF) as well as other transcription factors (SOX10 and OLIG2). We analyze a panel of 28 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located within the frequencies of common variants of MYRF, SOX10 and OLIG2 genes in professional athletes compared to non-athletes. No significant differences were detected after correction for multiple testing by false discovery rate (FDR) for any of the models tested. However, some deviations from the expected distribution was found for seven SNPs (rs174528, rs139884, rs149435516 and rs2238001, rs7943728, rs61747222, and rs198459). The MYRF alleles rs7943728 and rs61747222 showed a correlation with the level of sport achievement among the athletes. Even though the athletes did not differ from the non-athlete controls in the distribution of most SNPs analyzed, some interesting differences of several variants were noted. Presented results indicate that genetic variants of MYRF and SOX10 could be genetic factors weakly predisposing for successful athletic performance.

Highlights

Myelinated white matter plays a central role in brain messaging, and likely mediates processing speed, which is an important contributor to working memory performance and fluid intelligence [1]
In the central nervous system (CNS) myelin is synthetized by oligodendrocytes from proliferating precursors [5]
It seems plausible that variants of the genes encoding these transcription factors could affect the process of myelination by modulating the expression of numerous relevant genes, and as a result affect athletic performance

Summary

Introduction

Myelinated white matter plays a central role in brain messaging, and likely mediates processing speed, which is an important contributor to working memory performance and fluid intelligence [1]. Its efficiency varies between individuals and it has been suggested that these differences may play a role in athletic performance [3]. Most sports require numerous higher-order cognitive abilities and are performed under extreme stress where human limits are being continually challenged and extended. In such situations, even minute differences in the performance affect the classification in a competition [4]. This process appears to be adaptive and dynamic as both the absolute level of myelination and its rate vary throughout life [6,7]

Methods

Results

Conclusion