Muscles gene map to help diagnose diseases

Researchers have created a comprehensive overview of how thousands of genes interact in relation to the behaviour of muscles, thereby offering new insights into the biological mechanism that is at the root of a disease.

To begin with, for examining muscle genes that are involved in the carbohydrate metabolism, the data may help direct the development of medicine to help against diabetes.

The study compares the reactions of all genes in the muscles exposed to diverse muscular work with muscles that lack activity.

This was been achieved partly by means of taking muscle tissue samples from twenty young, healthy male participants, and partly by means of genetic screening.

The results represent an enormous volume of data which is now available to researchers all over the world.

"Genetic screening faces a major challenge in that tens of thousands of genes multiplied by a given number of test subjects involved and by a given number of points in time selected for measurement, quickly develops into hundreds of thousands of data points that you have to be able to comprehend and interpret," said Kristian Vissing from Aarhus University in Denmark.

"We have, therefore, developed a search tool which makes it easy for other researchers to find their way around the large volumes of data and obtain knowledge about the genes they are particularly interested in," Kristian Vissing added.

The study appeared in the journal Scientific Data.