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Updated: Dec 17, 2025

Skeletal Muscle Gender Dimorphism from Proteomics
Published on: December 14, 2011
Skeletal Muscle Transcriptomic Comparison between Long-Term Trained and Untrained Men and Women
Mark A Chapman1, Muhammad Arif2, Eric B Emanuelsson3
1Department of Integrated Engineering, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA 92110, USA; Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, 171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.
Abstract:
To better understand the health benefits of lifelong exercise in humans, we conduct global skeletal muscle transcriptomic analyses of long-term endurance- (9 men, 9 women) and strength-trained (7 men) humans compared with age-matched untrained controls (7 men, 8 women). Transcriptomic analysis, Gene Ontology, and genome-scale metabolic modeling demonstrate changes in pathways related to the prevention of metabolic diseases, particularly with endurance training. Our data also show prominent sex differences between controls and that these differences are reduced with endurance training. Additionally, we compare our data with studies examining muscle gene expression before and after a months-long training period in individuals with metabolic diseases. This analysis reveals that training shifts gene expression in individuals with impaired metabolism to become more similar to our endurance-trained group. Overall, our data provide an extensive examination of the accumulated transcriptional changes that occur with decades-long training and identify important "exercise-responsive" genes that could attenuate metabolic disease.
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