Long-Term Exercise Alters the Profiles of Circulating Micro-RNAs in the Plasma of Young Women.

Fan Li,Muwei Bai,Jianfang Xu,Rui Duan,Chengyi Liu,Ling Zhu

doi:10.3389/fphys.2020.00372

Fan Li, Muwei Bai + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2020.00372

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Abstract

Objective: The objective of this paper was to study the effects of long-term exercise on circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) in human plasma.Methods: Whole blood was collected from 10 female elite athletes with at least 5 years of training experience in a Synchronized Swimming Group (S group) and 15 female college students without regular exercise training (C group). Plasma miRNAs were then isolated, sequenced, and semi-quantified by the second-generation sequencing technology, and the results were analyzed by bioinformatics methods.Results: We found 380 differentially expressed miRNAs in the S group compared with the C group, among which 238 miRNAs were upregulated and 142 were downregulated. The top five abundant miRNAs in the 380 miRNAs of the S group are hsa-miR-451a, hsa-miR-486, hsa-miR-21-5p, hsa-miR-423-5p, and hsa-let-7b-5p. Muscle-specific/enriched miRNAs were not significantly different, except for miR-206 and miR-486. According to the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis, a large proportion of the differentially expressed miRNAs are targeted in cancer-related pathways, including proteoglycans in cancer and miRNAs in cancer and basal cell carcinoma. As the levels of circulating miRNAs (ci-miRNAs) are commonly known to be significantly deregulated in cancer patients, we further compared the levels of some well-studied miRNAs in different types of cancer patients with those in the S group and found that long-term exercise regulates the level of ci-miRNAs in an opposite direction to those in cancer patients.Conclusion: Long-term exercise significantly alters the profiles of plasma miRNAs in healthy young women. It may reduce the risk of certain types of cancers by regulating plasma miRNA levels.

Highlights

MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs with approximately 22 nucleotides in length
We compared the total plasma miRNAs of 10 players from a Synchronized Swimming Group and 15 female college students without regular exercise experience, using second-generation sequencing technology, to study the impact of long-term exercise on the plasma miRNA content
The average age of these 10 players was 19.1 years compared with 19.4 years of the control, and there was no significant age difference between these two groups (19.1 ± 2.08 vs. 19.4 ± 0.83 years, P = 0.67)

Summary

Introduction

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs with approximately 22 nucleotides in length. Their function is to degrade the targeted messenger RNAs (mRNAs) or inhibit their translation by binding to the complementary region of the mRNA molecules, which in turn participate in various biological or pathological processes (Bartel, 2004) They are found to be abundant and stable in biofluids, including blood serum/plasma (Chim et al, 2008), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) (Baraniskin et al, 2012; Sorensen et al, 2014; Akers et al, 2015), milk (Modepalli et al, 2014), saliva (Bahn et al, 2015), and urine (Cheng et al, 2014). We compared the total plasma miRNAs of 10 players from a Synchronized Swimming Group and 15 female college students without regular exercise experience, using second-generation sequencing technology, to study the impact of long-term exercise on the plasma miRNA content

Methods

Results

Conclusion