Nature Sub-Journal: Reveals the neural mechanisms that run faster and farther away.

Learn about the latest progress in neuroscience ● click on the blue letter to pay attention to us ● now you can see some school walls painted with slogans: "exercise for one hour every day, work healthily for 50 years", calling for active participation in physical exercise.Tsinghua University is a popular saying that "no sports, no Tsinghua".exercise has a positive regulatory effect on the central nervous system of the brain. In this process, several brain regions, such as cerebral cortex, thalamus, spinal cord, basal ganglia, brainstem and cerebellum, participate in the process.an article published in Science in 2018 revealed that exercise can reduce the accumulation of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease mice model, and improve the cognitive ability of these mice by promoting brain neurogenesis.in addition to improving cognitive ability, exercise can virtually improve motor skills in the process of exercise. For example, you can jog 2km before you can jog 10km after half a year's training. At the same time, the speed may also be accelerated; when you can swim 10m butterfly stroke and 50m after training, what happens to your brain in the process of exercise? On May 6, 2019, Nicholas C. Spitzer's research team published an article in the journal Nature communications, revealing that the brain neurotransmitter conversion after physical exercise promotes the improvement of exercise ability.the researchers put the mice on the wheel. At first, the mice ran slowly and often stopped. After 7 days of rotation (from 5 to 5 per minute within 6 minutes) In addition, the running speed of mice on the balance beam increased, which indicated that the motor skills of mice increased.how long can this skill last? The researchers found that after one week of training, the mice still maintained the above motor skills after two weeks of interval, but the skills disappeared after four weeks.through immunofluorescence c-fos labeling technology, the researchers found that during the above training process, the activation of neurons in hippocampus DG area and pedopontine nucleus (PPN) of midbrain increased, but the number of neurons activated in PPN brain area was almost six times as much as that in normal state. In addition, this brain area is closely related to motor.studies have shown that PPN receives motor information from the cerebral cortex and transmits this signal to the motor areas of thalamus, brainstem and spinal cord. It is mainly involved in motor function and contains cholinergic, GABAergic and glutamatergic neurons.anatomically, PPN can be divided into the rostrum (rppn) and the tail (CPPN). The rostrum is mainly GABAergic neurons, and the tail is mainly cholinergic and glutamatergic neurons.in the above-mentioned c-fos labeling technique, it was found that the co labeling ratio of neurons activated in CPPN brain area and cholinergic neurons after training was significantly higher than that in control group, while the proportion in rppn brain area was similar to that in control group.however, the number of cholinergic neurons in this brain region was significantly reduced, but there was neither neuronal apoptosis nor neuronal regeneration in this brain region, so it is likely that neurotransmitter conversion occurred.Image Source: neurotransmitter conversion in order to further understand what kind of neurotransmitter conversion happened, researchers injected CPPN of chat CRE cholinergic mice with virus and labeled cholinergic neurons. It was found that under normal circumstances, only about 2% GABAergic neurons, 29% GABAergic neurons and cholinergic neurons were co labeled, and 65% cholinergic neurons; and After training, about 12% GABAergic neurons were found in CPPN, 31% GABAergic neurons were co labeled with cholinergic neurons, while cholinergic neurons were only 24%.in addition, immunofluorescence assay showed that the number of glutamatergic neurons did not change after training, which indicated that there was a conversion from cholinergic to GABAergic in CPPN.after the researchers increased the cholinergic expression in the CPPN brain area through the virus tool, even after a week of running training, the motor skills of the mice did not improve; in addition, after inhibiting the expression of GABA in the CPPN brain region, the motor skills of the mice did not improve after training.this indicates that the improvement of motor skills requires the decrease of cholinergic expression and the increase of GABA expression.in general, this paper explains a very interesting thing: regular exercise improves motor skills. They found that during exercise, cholinergic neurotransmitter conversion from cholinergic to GABA occurs in the brain CPPN, which promotes the ability of motor learning.