Men have more active genes in skeletal muscle than women

Men have approximately 400 more active genes in their skeletal muscle than women have, according to a new study.

Researchers in the study produced a complete transcriptome - a key set of molecules that helped them "see" which genes are active in an organ at a particular time.

They found that men have approximately 400 more active genes in their skeletal muscle than women have."I hope that the gene activity results from this study will become a reference for human skeletal muscle and provide the basis for many new studies investigating skeletal muscle in different diseases and dysfunctions," said Malene Lindholm, a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

"In that way, we can understand our muscles better and possibly develop more optimal treatments and a more personalised health care," Lindholm said.

In the study, Lindholm and colleagues recruited nine male and nine female volunteers. Under local anesthesia, researchers extracted small pieces of skeletal muscle from both legs of each study participant.

Gene transcripts were isolated from the muscle pieces and then sequenced, so that the code for all transcripts could be used for comparing samples within a muscle, between individual legs and between men and women.

Results from the study produced the whole transcriptome (all transcripts present in the muscles at one time point) of human skeletal muscle in both men and women.The research was published in the FASEB Journal.