Relationship between n-3 PUFA content and energy metabolism in the flight muscles of a migrating shorebird: evidence for natural doping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During their fall migration from the Arctic to South America, semipalmated sandpipers Calidris pusilla stop in the Bay of Fundy (east coast of Canada) before flying non-stop for approximately 4500 km across the ocean. Refueling birds double their body mass by feeding on Corophium volutator, an amphipod containing high amounts of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA), particularly eicosapentaenoic (20:5) and docosahexaenoic acid (22:6). In mammals, high dietary intake of n-3 PUFA is known to increase capacity for oxidative metabolism. Therefore, we hypothesized that tissue incorporation of n-3 PUFA would be associated with increases in the activity of key muscle enzymes to upregulate energy metabolism for prolonged exercise. Birds were collected at various stages of fat loading to monitor changes in lipid composition and flight muscle enzymes simultaneously. Enzymes were measured to assess oxidative capacity [citrate synthase (CS)], beta-oxidation [carnitine palmitoyl transferase (CPT) and 3-hydroxyacyl dehydrogenase (HOAD)] and glycolytic capacity [lactate dehydrogenase (LDH)]. Changes in the fatty acid composition of muscle membranes (phospholipids) and fuel reserves (neutral lipids) were measured separately to distinguish between membrane-related and systemic effects of n-3 PUFA. Results show that muscle CS and HOAD are stimulated during refueling and that their activities are correlated with n-3 PUFA content in phospholipids (22:6 for CS, 20:5 for HOAD) and in neutral lipids (20:5 for CS). This suggests that 20:5 and 22:6 have different effects on energy metabolism and that they act via changes in membrane structure and systemic mechanisms. CPT and LDH did not change during refueling, but LDH activity was significantly related to the n-3 PUFA content of fuel reserves. This study shows that oxidative capacity increases rapidly during refueling and supports the idea that dietary n-3 PUFA are used as molecular signals to prime flight muscles of some long-distance migrants for extreme exercise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".