The effect of an acute exercise stimulus would last about 48 hours. If we perform cell cultures (lasting more than 48 hours) and then measure a protein or RNA, would that measurement really reflect the effect of acute exercise?
In addition, placing cells in culture will itself induce biochemical changes which will not be discernable from the those caused by acute exercise unless you have a comprehensive set of controls which can be monitored in freshly isolated cells prior to culture.
Artur Burzynski and Marcus Hanley thank you for your answers. If the stimulus is performed before the culture then I guess the only way to examine the effects of an acute exercise stimulus with cultured cells is by having a a set of controls prior to the culture and compare them. Otherwise, a post-cultured stimulus could be induced with options such as muscle stimulation and/or exercise mimetics. It may not be as good as in vitro stimulus, but it may represent a good enough model for this examination.
Cell culture will not be a direct comparison to an in vivo response such as exercise. In order to best simulate the exercise response your best option will be to culture with post-exercise serum. This will insure that your cells are exposed to all the circulating factors they would be exposed to in vivo. The response you see will depend on the type of cells you're culturing i.e. whole blood will be different from PBMCs. Whole blood will be closer to what you would see in vivo however, you won't be able to tell which cell types are producing RNA or protein. Whole blood culture will also not require serum.
Thank you for your response Anson Blanks. I don't think there is a doubt that cultured cells can not be directly compared with freshly isolated muscle cells. My question was about the detection of an exercise stimulus on cultured skeletal muscle cells.
I am not sure that a culture with post-exercise serum or whole blood would be a more close approach to in vivo situation, since both the blood composition and supply to skeletal muscle change after exercise, depending to individual characteristics (such as maximal heart rate, blood volume, VO2max, etc..). For example, after a very intensive/maximum exercise stimulus blood lactate could rise to a 20-fold increase two minutes after the end of the exercise with a half-life of 10 to 20 minutes. So, if we expose the culture to an immediate (1st to 2nd minute) post-exercise serum the serum would have at least a 10-fold difference in lactate concentration than post-exercise serum after 15 to 20 minutes.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Engineering
- Modeling