Chronic lactate treatment promotes cardiomyocyte cytoskeleton remodelling

Abstract Physical activity is an important regulator of energy homeostasis and helps the improvement of metabolic health lowering the risk for a broad variety of health problems. The driving force of the good health impact of exercise is the new established metabolism in people who practise regular physical activity; in fact, regular physical movement induces a wide variety of molecular adaptations in skeletal muscle and in the whole body. In previous studies performed on elite players, we found that adaptation to exercises is characterized by a chronic high plasma level of lactate. By shuttling between producer and consumer cells, lactate is considered not only an energy source but also a signalling molecule and is referred to as a “lactormone”. In this work, we investigated the effect of exogenous lactate in human cardiomyocyte cell line AC16 assessing their viability, cell cycle activity, oxidative stress and metabolism by a proteomic and metabolomic approach. Interestingly, our data indicated that cardiomyocytes exposed to chronic lactate treatment (72 h) show change in several proteins and metabolites linked to cell hypertrophy and cytoskeleton remodelling.