The impact of endurance exercise on human skeletal muscle transcriptome

The aim of this study was to elucidate the transcriptional signatures that distinguish the endurance-trained and the untrained muscle in healthy adult young males, both at baseline as well as in response to an acute bout of exercise. We characterized baseline differences as well as acute exercise-induced transcriptome responses in vastus lateralis biopsy specimen of endurance-trained athletes (ET; n = 8; age, 25.4 ±3.8; VO2max, 67.2 ±8.9 ml/min/kg) and sedentary untrained volunteers (SED; n = 8; age, 22.6 ±2.8; VO2max, 40.3 ±7.6 ml/min/kg) using Human Genome U219 (HG-U219) microarray platform. The acute exercise protocol that consisted of 60 min of high intensity cycling exercise on a cycle ergometer at a power requiring 80% of the individual VO2max (including 10 min of initial warm-up cycling at 60% VO2max). Baseline samples of the resting muscle were obtained 24 hours before the acute exercise protocol was started. Post exercise biopsies were taken at 30 min (+30') and at 3 hours (+3 h) after cessation of acute cycling exercise.