Transient MYC Mimicking the Exercise Response Orchestrates Multifaceted Skeletal Muscle Adaptations

Despite decades of study, MYC's physiological role in adult tissues remains obscured by the models used to investigate it. Most work relies almost exclusively on chronic or constitutive MYC induction that recapitulates the sustained activity found in tumorigenesis and expectedly produces pathological outcomes. What has gone largely untested is how MYC operates when induced in a controlled and physiologically relevant manner, as it is during adaptive processes such as exercise. Using a recombination-independent strategy in adult skeletal muscle, transient MYC bursts drive coordinated hypertrophic-metabolic reprogramming followed by a shift in myosin fiber type, recapitulating adaptations characteristic of concurrent endurance and resistance training. A single pleiotropic transcription factor governing several aspects of muscle health reframes perspectives on a gene understood almost entirely in the context of pathology. We uncover a previously unrecognized muscle-specific role for MYC in controlling muscle cell composition and present a multi-timepoint multi-omic resource for interrogating MYC: data.myoanalytics.com/study/myc_transient/gene.