Research Article

Increased Gene Expression of RUNX2 and SOX9 in Mesenchymal Circulating Progenitors Is Associated with Autophagy during Physical Activity

Figure 6

Physical exercise induced the upregulation of autophagy-related genes in M-CPC (a). To confirm this finding, we treated a MSC line with PRE RUN and POST RUN sera and we analyzed p62, ATG5, and LC3 expression. As shown in (b), MSCs treated with POST RUN sera expressed lower p62 and higher ATG5 and total LC3 (both LC3I and LC3II) protein levels compared to cells treated with PRE RUN sera. This last finding was confirmed by analyzing the number of cells expressing LC3 (c), evaluated by a fluorescence confocal microscope, 63x. In vitro analyses were performed in three independent experiments, ; #.
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