Muscle plasticity and high throughput gene expression studies.

Changes in gene expression are known to contribute to muscle plasticity. Until recently most studies have described differences of one or few genes at a time, in the last few years, however, the development of new technology of high throughput mRNA expression analysis has allowed the study of a large part if not all transcripts in the same experiment. Knowledge on any muscle adaptive response has already gained from the application of this novel approach, but the most important new findings have come from studies on muscle atrophy. A new and unexpected groups of genes, which increase their expression during atrophy and are, therefore, designated as atrogins, have been discovered. In spite of the impressive power of the new technology many problems are still to be resolved to optimize the experimental design and to extract all information which are provided by the outcome of the global mRNA assessment.