Effect of ATF4 overexpression on mouse skeletal muscle mRNA levels

Fasting increases the level of skeletal muscle ATF4 mRNA, which promotes skeletal myofiber atrophy. To begin to determine the mechanism of ATF4-mediated myofiber atrophy, we compared the effects of fasting and ATF4 overexpression on global skeletal muscle mRNA expression in C57BL/6 mice. These data are from experiments to determine the effect of ATF4 overexpression. On day 0, the tibialis anterior (TA) muscles of male C57BL/6 mice were transfected via electroporation as follows: the left TA muscle was transfected with 25 μg empty pcDNA3 vector, and the right TA muscle was transfected with 25 μg pCMV-ATF4-FLAG. On day 11, TA muscle RNA was harvested, and then subjected to exon expression array analysis. mRNA levels in the presence of ATF4 (right TA) were normalized to levels in the absence of ATF4 (left TA), which were set at 1. These experiments were performed 4 times to generate the final data.