SICB 2019: Mitochondria Effects on Endurance and Metabolic Rate

Animals have to perform a lot of complex tasks within their environment in order to reproduce and survive. To perform these tasks, animals often rely on their ability to move throughout their environment, and animals that do this often are often better fit within their environment. That’s why exercise is so important, ladies and gentlemen! Frequent exercise will increase your ability to run fast or run far, but it often comes at a cost. For one, increased exercise response is met with a reduction in your ability to fight an infection (i.e. immunocompetence) or reproduce.

To further understand the effects of exercise on animals in general, Kara Reardon, a student of Jerry Husak’s at the University of St. Thomas, devised an experiment to understand how increases in cellular mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell!) influence performance after endurance training. They provided green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) with pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) a training supplement to artificially increase their mitochondria production and found that PQQ (and a higher level of mitochondria) didn’t necessarily influence endurance capacity directly, but found that it lowered metabolic rates in their lizards. They also found that muscle metabolism was not affected by training, but that exercise overall increased the performance capacities of green anoles. Next up, they are going to quantify the genes involved in their observed endurance enhancements in these anoles. Great stuff from Reardon and Husak!

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Anthony Gilbert

Anthony Gilbert is a postdoctoral researcher advised by Butch Brodie III at the University of Virginia. While his current work explores coevolution between toxic newts and their garter snake predators, his previous work focused on lizard (including anoles!) responses to anthropogenic climate change.

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