Meeting Abstract
Female mice that exercise during pregnancy have offspring that show improved overall glucose disposal when compared to offspring from sedentary dams, and skeletal muscles are one of the major organs involved in glucose metabolism. Therefore, the goal of this study was to measure oxidative enzyme activity in muscle, specifically the diaphragm, in the offspring of exercised and sedentary mice. To achieve this goal, pregnant female mice were separated into two groups, sedentary and exercise. Sedentary dams did not have access to a wheel during pregnancy, while exercised dams were placed into controlled exercise wheel systems for one hour a day. Diaphragm samples were then collected from the two-day–old neonates of dams in both groups. The citrate synthase (CS) activities of these samples were measured with a microplate reader under the following conditions: 50 mM imidazole, 0.25 mM DNTB, 0.4 mM acetyl CoA, and 0.5 mM oxaloacetate, and pH 7.5 at 37°C. The rate of change of the assay absorbance (at 412 nm) at the maximum linear slope (Vmax) was used to calculate the CS activities of the diaphragms. The average CS activity of the diaphragm of pups of sedentary dams was 28.26 (±1.25) micromoles/min*g, and the average for pups of exercised dams was 31.59 (±1.40) micromoles/min*g. This result demonstrates that exercise led to a slight increase in CS activity in the mouse pup diaphragms, and the increase in the oxidative activity of this muscle may contribute to the improved glucose disposal of the pups of exercised mothers. However, since the increase in CS activity was so small, this effect of perinatal exercise cannot be the main driver of changes in pup glucose metabolism.
