After the COVID 19 conference break, Pablo de Olavide University has hosted the 27th annual Congress of the European College of Sport Science (ECSS) in Seville (Spain) from 30th August to 2nd September 2022. The ECSS is one of the largest conferences related to sport science in the world.
Philipp Baumert represented the professorship of Exercise Biology at the ECSS and gave an invited talk. Together with Dr Juulia Lautaoja (Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland) and Dr Dan Owens (Lecturer at the Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK), who has organised this invited symposium, they presented their experience and research about the topic “Metabolomics in sports and exercise science”.
Historically, exercise physiologists have been able to study only small numbers of metabolites in response to different nutrition, exercise or lack thereof. Whilst targeted sampling of metabolites undoubtedly allowed for the characterisation of many important pathways, it has not provided a comprehensive, unbiased approach to detect all exercise induced changes in all metabolic pathways. It is suggested that there are more than 110,000 different metabolites in the human body and more than 46,000 associated metabolic or metabolite signalling pathways. Therefore, it is clear that the historical approach to sampling a handful of targeted metabolites provides only a snapshot of the metabolic signature in the human body at any one time. Sport and exercise science and medicine is perhaps the most eloquent example of how the metabolome responds to external stimuli and therefore the field of exercise metabolomics holds considerable promise in pushing the boundaries of our understanding in human metabolism. This symposium was targeted to anyone in the field of sport and exercise science and medicine, including applied scientists and basic research scientists. The topics presented include examples of metabolomics used in applied sport science in the field and in the laboratory. The purpose was to provide a holistic introduction to the field of exercise metabolomics for all who would like to learn what this approach is and how it can be applied to different research questions.
In the presentation of Philipp Baumert, he firstly discussed the benefits and the limitation of untargeted metabolomics analysis in muscle tissue and, as a consequence, the current incomplete coverage of global metabolic changes during muscle growth. He then presented data generated in the lab of Henning Wackerhage and the exercise biology group about the effect of muscle growth stimulation on metabolic changes in differentiated murine skeletal muscle stem cells in vitro and in hypertrophied mouse muscles in vivo. In this regard, he explained the outcomes and that the identification of pathways associated with muscle hypertrophy is more important to advance this new field than only detecting changes of individual metabolites. The objectives of this presentation were to facilitate the understanding of the omics-based systems approach for gaining a comprehensive insight in metabolic adaptation following muscle hypertrophy, and to elicit debate of the future direction of this field, how discoveries of novel biomarkers will help to develop efficient training regimes for athletes.
The next ECSS congress will be held in Paris, France from 4-7 July 2023, and we are sure that some of the Exercise Biology team will present at this congress, again!