LncRNAs are Differentially Expressed in Skeletal Muscle Following Acute Aerobic and Resistance Exercise: A Bioinformatics Analysis

Abstract

Although there has been a great deal of research on the molecular mechanisms that regulate responses to different modes of acute exercise in human skeletal muscle, there is still much to be discovered. Advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, such as RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), have immense potential in furthering our understanding of exercise biology. Increasing evidence suggests that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have regulatory functions in many biological processes, including the adaptive response to exercise. Here, I analyzed the expression of lncRNAs in skeletal muscle following acute aerobic exercise (AE) and resistance exercise (RE). I downloaded publicly available RNA-seq data (skeletal muscle biopsies from Dickinson et al., 2018) to conduct a bioinformatics analysis to investigate the expression of lncRNAs following different types of exercise (AE vs. RE). To characterize the expression patterns of lncRNAs following different types of acute exercise, I performed a differential expression analysis and compared lncRNA expression profiles between different exercise types (AE vs. RE) at three time points (baseline, 1-hour post-exercise, 4 hours post-exercise). For the first time, I report distinct lncRNA profiles between acute AE and RE at different time points. Together, these results suggest that lncRNAs may have different roles in the regulation of the response to different types of acute exercise in skeletal muscle. These findings emphasize the unique transcriptomic response of skeletal muscle to different modes of acute exercise and warrant future studies on the roles of lncRNAs in the response to acute exercise in skeletal muscle.