About this Research Topic

Background

Exercise stimulates metabolic and structural adaptations that primarily affect the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, and immune systems. Strenuous exercise stress, characteristic of both horses and humans, can affect health and lead to syndromes of poor performance. Indeed, prolonged strenuous exercise can temporarily trigger inflammation that reflects the intensity and duration of the exercise session and triggers an innate immune response. Training modulates athletic performance and is important in reducing inflammation and preventing disease. For this specific source of stress, the horse is an optimal model organism that is often used to study the genomic response to training-induced stress because it is naturally capable of athletic performance and has a relatively homogeneous genetic and environmental background.

In livestock animals, environmental stresses (e.g., heat stress) can negatively affect health and production by affecting the immune system, among other things. An organism uses various behavioral or physiological mechanisms to cope with a disruption of homeostasis, and although acquiring a positive adaptation (resilience) is a priority, some individuals may respond better than others. In addition, hyperthermia in utero leads to lasting and intergenerational effects on the developing fetus, leaving a permanent imprint that can affect offspring growth and metabolism, which can persist into adulthood. To date, research on animal resilience has focused primarily on animal productivity and welfare. However, finding specific resilience markers could provide the opportunity to incorporate resilience into breeding objectives, with significant benefits compared to management improvements. Indeed, resilient animals require less time for attention, and increasing resilience may overcome problems associated with global stressors such as climate change, where the application of local mitigation technologies may not be sustainable or feasible.

The cellular mechanisms that mediate adaptations to exercise-induced stress and the mechanisms for responding to stressful environmental stimuli that characterize resilient animals are not yet fully understood.

High-throughput omics technologies are central to understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the response to these stress stimuli, assessing the totality of molecules and their interactions at different levels of biological organization. On the other hand, more targeted and time- and cost-saving techniques to assess the expression and production of molecules in a given biological context are well accepted.

The aim of this Research Topic is to collect high-quality Original Research or Review Articles that examine in depth the molecular mechanisms of cellular response to stress stimuli that may affect livestock animals for a better comprehension and/or for individuating markers of stress in order to improve animal performance and welfare.

In this case, research can focus on two types of stress stimuli: exercise-induced stress and social stress. In particular, studies on molecular changes induced by the aforementioned stressors and the resulting ability to restore homeostasis, as well as training for exercise-induced stress and predisposition of animals that characterize the adaptation process will be accepted, especially in terms of genomic and immunological responses with particular attention to the less studied part of the genome that contributes with a variety of mechanisms and/or molecules (alternative splicing, intron retention, transcription of repetitive elements.

The main areas to be included in this Research Topic are:

- Discovery of new markers of stress.

- Omics approaches (such as genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and metagenomics) to uncover new insights into biological processes.

- Targeted technologies for testing gene and protein expression, e.g. RT-qPCR, ELISA, Western Blot.

Keywords: Exercise-induced stress, environmental stresses, horse, genomic response, omics, Livestock, Resilience

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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