The heart depends critically on continuous blood supply, but it is unknown whether cancer itself affects myocardial blood flow (MBF). This study investigated MBF in cancer patients and cardiac morphology in a cancer mice model. MBF was quantified with [O]HO positron emission tomography at rest in recently diagnosed breast cancer patients and age-matched female controls, and additionally during 10-min exercise in the cancer patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe thermal sensitivity of heart rate (fH) in fishes has fascinated comparative physiologists for well over a century. We now know that elevating fH is the primary mechanism through which fishes increase convective oxygen delivery during warming to meet the concomitant rise in tissue oxygen consumption. Thus, limits on fH can constrain whole-animal aerobic metabolism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobally, marine heatwave frequency, intensity, and duration are on the rise, posing a significant threat to plankton communities, the foundational elements of the marine food web. This study investigates the ecological and physiological responses of a temperate plankton community in the Thau lagoon, north-western Mediterranean, to a simulated +3°C ten-day heatwave followed by a ten-day post-heatwave period in in-situ mesocosms. Our analyses encompassed zooplankton grazing, production, community composition in water and sediment traps, as well as oxidative stress and anti-oxidant biomarkers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe possible beneficial effects of physical activity during doxorubicin treatment of breast cancer need further investigation as many of the existing studies have been done on non-tumor-bearing models. Therefore, in this study, we aim to assess whether short-term voluntary wheel-running exercise during doxorubicin treatment of breast cancer-bearing mice could induce beneficial cardiac effects and enhance chemotherapy efficacy. Murine breast cancer I3TC cells were inoculated subcutaneously to the flank of female FVB mice ( = 16) that were divided into exercised and non-exercised groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
February 2024
Metabolic rates, including standard (SMR) and maximum (MMR) metabolic rate have often been linked with life-history strategies. Variation in context- and tissue-level metabolism underlying SMR and MMR may thus provide a physiological basis for life-history variation. This raises a hypothesis that tissue-specific metabolism covaries with whole-animal metabolic rates and is genetically linked to life history.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn avian species, the number of chicks in the nest and subsequent sibling competition for food are major components of the offspring's early-life environment. A large brood size is known to affect chick growth, leading in some cases to long-lasting effects for the offspring, such as a decrease in size at fledgling and in survival after fledging. An important pathway underlying different growth patterns could be the variation in offspring mitochondrial metabolism through its central role in converting energy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComp Biochem Physiol A Mol Integr Physiol
January 2023
This study evaluated whether different parameters describing cardiovascular function, energy metabolism, oxygen transport and oxidative stress were related to the critical thermal maximum (CT) of European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) and if there were differential changes in these parameters during and after heat shock in animals with different CT in order to characterize which physiological features make seabass vulnerable to heat waves. Seabass (n = 621) were tested for CT and the physiological parameters were measured in individuals with good or poor temperature tolerance before and after a heat shock (change in temperature from 15 °C to 28 °C in 1.5 h).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComp Biochem Physiol A Mol Integr Physiol
October 2022
One of the physiological mechanisms that can limit the fish's ability to face hypoxia or elevated temperature, is maximal cardiac performance. Yet, few studies have measured how cardiac electrical activity and associated calcium cycling proteins change with acclimation to those environmental stressors. To examine this, we acclimated European sea bass for 6 weeks to three experimental conditions: a seasonal average temperature in normoxia (16 °C; 100% air sat.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this study was to investigate whether subcutaneous melanoma impairs intrinsic cardiac function and hypoxia tolerance in mice. In addition, it was investigated whether these changes could be prevented by voluntary wheel-running exercise. The roles of different molecular pathways were also analyzed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEctotherms can respond to climate change via evolutionary adaptation, usually resulting in an increase of their upper thermal tolerance. But whether such adaptation influences the phenotypic plasticity of thermal tolerance when encountering further environmental stressors is not clear yet. This is crucial to understand because organisms experience multiple stressors, besides warming climate, in their natural environment and pollution is one of those.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe cardiovascular performance of salmonids in aquaculture can be impaired by acute climate warming, posing risks for fish survival. Exercise training and functional feeds have been shown to be cardioprotective in mammals but their action on the fish heart and its upper thermal performance has not been studied. To investigate this, rainbow trout were trained at a moderate water velocity of 1 body length per second (bl s) for 6 h per day, either alone or in combination with one of two functional feed-supplements, allicin and fucoidan.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeat waves are threatening fish around the world, leading sometimes to mass mortality events. One crucial function of fish failing in high temperatures is oxygen delivery capacity, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExercise is known to improve cardiac recovery following coronary occlusion. However, whether short-term exercise can improve cardiac function and hypoxia tolerance ex vivo independent of reperfusion injury and the possible role of calcium channels in improved hypoxia tolerance remains unknown. Therefore, in the current study, heart function was measured ex vivo using the Langendorff method at different oxygen levels after a 4-week voluntary wheel-running regimen in trained and untrained male mice (C57Bl/6NCrl).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change and pollution are some of the greatest anthropogenic threats to wild animals. Transgenerational plasticity-when parental exposure to environmental stress leads to changes in offspring phenotype-has been highlighted as a potential mechanism to respond to various environmental and anthropogenic changes across taxa. Transgenerational effects may be mediated via multiple mechanisms, such as transfer of maternal hormones to eggs/foetus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe prevalence of diabetic metabolic derangement (DMetD) has increased dramatically over the last decades. Although there is increasing evidence that DMetD is associated with cardiac dysfunction, the early DMetD-induced myocardial alterations remain incompletely understood. Here, we studied early DMetD-related cardiac changes in a clinically relevant large animal model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComp Biochem Physiol A Mol Integr Physiol
February 2020
Virtually all organisms respond to heat shock by transcription of genes encoding for heat shock proteins (HSPs), but the mechanisms behind post-transcriptional regulation are not known in detail. When we exposed zebrafish to 5 and 7 °C above normal rearing temperature for 30 min, hsp70 mRNA expression was 28 and 150 -fold higher than in control, respectively. Protein expression, on the other hand, showed no significant change at the +5 °C and a 2-fold increase at the +7 °C exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe importance of interindividual variability in environmental responses has been little studied, although the available information suggests that, e.g., changes in environmental temperature may be associated with changes in variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mean value of any parameter and its changes are usually discussed, when ecotoxicological studies are carried out. However, also the variation of any parameter and its changes can be important components of the responses to environmental contamination. Although the homogeneity of variances is commonly tested, testing is done for the use of correct statistical methods, not because of exploring the possibility that variability and its changes could be important components of environmental responses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe climate-change-driven increase in temperature is occurring rapidly and decreasing the predictability of seasonal rhythms at high latitudes. It is therefore urgent to understand how a change in the relationship between photoperiod and temperature can affect ectotherms in these environments. We tested whether temperature affects daily rhythms of transcription in a cold-adapted salmonid using high-throughput RNA sequencing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOil spills pose a threat to aquatic organisms. However, the physiological effects of crude oil on cardiac function and on thermal tolerance of juvenile fish are still poorly understood. Consequently, in this paper, we will present results of two separate experiments where we exposed juvenile rainbow trout and European sea bass to crude oil and made cardiac thermal tolerances and maximum heart rate (f ) measurements after 1 week (rainbow trout) and 6-month recovery (sea bass).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe heat shock response (HSR) refers to the rapid production of heat shock proteins (hsps) in response to a sudden increase in temperature. Its regulation by heat shock factors is a good example of how gene expression is transcriptionally regulated by environmental stresses. In contrast, little is known about post-transcriptional regulation of the response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnthropogenic activities are greatly altering the habitats of animals, whereby fish are already encountering several stressors simultaneously. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the capacity of fish to respond to two different environmental stressors (high temperature and overnight hypoxia) separately and together. We found that acclimation to increased temperature (from 7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe wide thermal tolerance range of a eurythermic fish (goldfish, Carassius auratus) was used to evaluate how temperature performance curves derived from maximum heart rate (fH) related to those for aerobic scope. For acclimation temperatures of 12°, 20°, and 28°C, optimum temperatures derived from aerobic scope curves (Topt) were 19.9° ± 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith global temperatures projected to surpass the limits of thermal tolerance for many species, evaluating the heritable variation underlying thermal tolerance is critical for understanding the potential for adaptation to climate change. We examined the evolutionary potential of thermal tolerance within a population of chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) by conducting a full-factorial breeding design and measuring the thermal performance of cardiac function and the critical thermal maximum (CTmax) of offspring from each family. Additive genetic variation in offspring phenotype was mostly negligible, although these direct genetic effects explained 53% of the variation in resting heart rate (fH).
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