exercise

Working Out the Chemistry of Exercise Endurance

IRP’s Paul Hwang Discovers How Muscle Cells Gear Up for Training

joggers

As the weather warms up in March, which is National Athletic Training Month, many of us come out of hibernation and finally fulfill that new year’s resolution to start exercising. Deep down in our cells, our mitochondria, the tiny power stations that turn oxygen into energy, start getting a workout, too.

IRP senior investigator Paul Hwang, M.D., Ph.D., studies how mitochondria and cellular energy production affect human health and disease, with a particular focus on cardiovascular health and cancer. However, March’s many new fitness enthusiasts might be most interested in a recent finding from his laboratory that seems to explain how muscles build endurance as we train them through exercise. His team’s insights also explain why muscles revert back to couch potato mode so quickly when we stop regular exercise. 

A Summer of Science

Summer Poster Days Showcase IRP Summer Intern Research

IRP summer intern Thomas Savage

Every summer, NIH welcomes hundreds of enthusiastic young men and women to its campuses to work as summer interns, providing them with scientific training and mentorship from some of the world’s preeminent researchers. As always, the Summer Internship Program culminated this year with Summer Poster Days, held on August 1 and 2, a bustling event where summer interns showcase the results of their immersion into IRP research. Nearly 800 IRP summer interns participated in this year’s event, presenting research on cancer vaccines, new applications for virtual reality technology, experimental antifungal treatments, how the brain perceives pitch in sounds, and much more. Read on for a glimpse at some of this year’s summer interns and the work they braved a blazing Washington, D.C., summer to pursue.

Scouting Out Summer Poster Day

Annual Event Held In-Person for First Time in Four Years

Amia Black poses with her poster at Summer Poster Day

A few weeks ago, NIH’s Natcher Conference Center bustled with the youthful scientific enthusiasm of IRP summer interns for the first time since 2019, the last time that the IRP’s Summer Poster Day was held in-person. At this year’s event, held on August 3 and 4, the hundreds of high school and college students who conducted research in IRP labs as part of NIH’s Summer Internship Program this year eagerly showed off the fruits of their labors — from discoveries about how weight loss drugs affect the brain to new insights into a potential treatment target for age-related vision loss. Read on to learn more about a few of these scientific upstarts and the research revelations they’ve helped uncover.

IRP Study Gets Kids Moving to Improve Blood Sugar Control

Interrupting Sedentary Time Could Help Stave Off Health Problems

little girl playing on a tablet

Many people don’t get much exercise these days, and kids are no exception. Whether at school, doing homework, or entertaining themselves online, children and teens spend hours on end sitting around. That lack of physical activity raises their risk for metabolic conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes, but according to a recent IRP study, breaking up those long, sedentary periods with just a few minutes of exercise could yield noticeable benefits for their health.

Helping Aging Hearts Get Their Groove Back

IRP Researchers Discover ‘Coupled-Clock’ That Controls Heart Rhythms

heart rate monitor

Like so much about our lives, our hearts slow down as we age. While this slowing is natural, a heartbeat that is too sluggish can lead to heart failure, irregular heartbeats known as arrhythmias, and other problems. IRP senior investigator Edward G. Lakatta, M.D., has changed the paradigm in our understanding of how our hearts keep the beat across our life spans — and what happens when they don’t.

Exercise Energizes Patients With Autoimmune Disease

IRP Study Points to the Biological Roots of Physical Activity’s Benefits

woman exercising on treadmill

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While not exactly a “technology,” exercise has such wide-ranging health benefits that it could understandably be mistaken for magic. Still, scientists persist in investigating precisely why physical activity is so good for us. Recently, a small IRP study showed that exercise training can help reduce the debilitating fatigue that often accompanies the autoimmune disease known as lupus, and also illuminated some of the underlying mechanisms that may lead to those benefits.

Postdoc Profile: Going the Extra Mile

Dr. Ayland Letsinger examines the effects of exercise on the brain

Dr. Ayland Letsinger

Every January, gyms are flooded with new members using the beginning of a new year as a burst of motivation to get fit. When many of these new exercise enthusiasts abandon their new healthy habit within a couple months, they shouldn’t feel guilty, according to IRP postdoctoral fellow Ayland Letsinger, Ph.D. He believes there’s a genetic component behind our fluctuating interest in exercise, and he spends his days in his IRP lab investigating such biological factors behind the motivation to move.

“More people would rather binge-watch 'Stranger Things’ for three hours than do 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, and there may be a biological basis behind it,” he explains.

Poster Sessions Celebrate Summer Science

Annual Event Brandishes the Next Generation of Clinicians and Scientists

Andrés Gorbea, Sarah Bengtson, Lietsel Jones, Michaella Bono, and Joseph Grech

A year after hundreds of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students were only able to participate from afar in NIH’s 2021 Summer Internship Program, IRP researchers were excited to welcome some of the program’s 2022 participants to campus. Regardless of whether they were working in the lab or remotely, these budding scientists received a full-time immersion into the world of IRP science and, surely, learned a great deal from the mentorship of NIH’s many world-renowned researchers.

To celebrate the interns’ hard work, NIH’s Summer Poster Days on August 3 and 4 gave more than 600 of them the opportunity to virtually present posters explaining their projects. With so many bright young men and women displaying the fruits of their scientific labors, it was difficult to select just a handful to highlight in this blog. Read on to learn about how five of NIH’s 2022 summer interns shed light on topics from the microbes living on our skin to the blood-clotting platelets that flow through our veins.

Three-Minute Talks Showcase Smooth-Talking Scientists

IRP Researchers Engage and Educate at Competition Finals

Three-Minute Talks poster

English is generally considered the ‘international language of science,’ since nearly all scientific papers are published in English. Yet, even to a native English speaker, scientists seem to be using another language entirely to talk about their research. Most Americans, after all, don’t know an ‘autophagosome’ from a ‘lysosome’ and would be hard-pressed to explain the difference between an ‘oocyst’ and a ’sporozoite.’

Fortunately, efforts like NIH’s annual Three-Minute Talks (TmT) competition are helping scientists learn how to communicate about their research in a manner that is much easier to understand. On June 30, after months spent whittling down dozens of competitors from across the IRP, 10 finalists raced against the clock to explain their work and its importance in a clear and compelling way.

Languishing Cellular Batteries Foretell Movement Problems

Prediction Method Could Help Prevent Age-Related Physical Decline

burned out lightbulb

Throughout human history, people have sought insight into their fates from self-proclaimed psychics and other dubious fortune tellers. Fortunately, scientists are increasingly developing more reliable, data-driven ways to predict the future. For instance, IRP researchers recently showed that an assessment of the cellular batteries that power our muscles can predict the deterioration of physical abilities in older adults.