Increased biological relevance of transcriptome analyses in human skeletal muscle using a model-specific pipeline

Human skeletal muscle responds to weight-bearing exercise with significant inter-individual differences. Investigation of transcriptome responses could improve our understanding of this variation. However, this requires bioinformatic pipelines to be established and evaluated in study-specific contexts. Skeletal muscle subjected to mechanical stress, such as through resistance training (RT), accumulates RNA due to increased ribosomal biogenesis. When a fixed amount of total-RNA is used for RNA-seq library preparations, mRNA counts are thus assessed in different amounts of tissue, potentially invalidating subsequent conclusions. The

Optimized selection of bioinformatic tools increases the biological relevance of transcriptome analyses from resistance-trained skeletal muscle. Moreover, normalization procedures need to account for global changes in rRNA and mRNA abundance.