Molecular characterisation of muscle and spinal cord tissues from young, old and old exercised C57BL/6 wild type male mice

To investigate the effect of exercise in several tissues, mice had free access to the wheel for two months, starting at the age of 16 to 18 months. Age-matched and younger sedentary controls were included. Running wheels were removed from the cages at least 4 days before necropsy, to eliminate acute effects of exercise. At the end of the trial, RNA was isolated from spinal cord, gastrocnemius and quadriceps muscle to perform bulk transcriptome (RNAseq) analysis. Despite many genes were differentially expressed in skeletal muscle samples following exercise, only few individual genes resulted changed by exercise in spinal cord. mRNA profiling of whole spinal cord, quadriceps and gastrocnemius muscles of young (10 months), mid-aged (18 months) sedentary and exercised wild type male mice