Abstract
Understanding the metabolic processes in energy metabolism, particularly during fasted exercise, is a growing area of research. Previous work has focused on measuring metabolites pre and post exercise. This can provide information about the final state of energy metabolism in the participants, but it does not show how these processes vary during the exercise and any subsequent post-exercise period. To address this, the work described here took fasted participants and subjected them to an exercise and rest protocol under laboratory settings, which allowed for breath and blood sampling both pre, during and post exercise. Analysis of the data produced from both the physiological measurements and the untargeted metabolomics measurements showed clear switching between glycolytic and ketolytic metabolism, with the liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) data showing the separate stages of ketolytic metabolism, notably the transport, release and breakdown of long chain fatty acids. Several signals, putatively identified as short peptides, were observed to change in a pattern similar to that of the ketolytic metabolites. This work highlights the power of untargeted metabolomic methods as an investigative tool for exercise science, both to follow known processes in a more complete way and discover possible novel biomarkers.
Highlights
The current understanding of metabolic processes influenced by exercise is based mainly on targeted analysis methods as described by Egan et al [1]
To assess the effort and recovery of the participants, heart rate (HR) was recorded at 15-min intervals and breath samples were collected every 15 min to calculate the percentage of VO2 max
As this study uses a small number of participants, this physiological data is useful as it shows we can group participants together as biological replicates, a requirement of mass spectrometry metabolomic methods
Summary
The current understanding of metabolic processes influenced by exercise is based mainly on targeted analysis methods as described by Egan et al [1]. Targeted methods have been used to investigate other indicators of energy metabolism, such as the work by Gibala et al showing increased flux in the tri-carboxylic acid (TCA) cycle in skeletal muscle during moderate exercise and after intense exercise [4]. While these methods have allowed for the analysis of markers of exercise and health, a large number of intermediate metabolites that are key to fully understanding the biochemistry present are not seen
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