Sex-divergent skeletal muscle remodelling emerges early in cancer cachexia

This dataset profiles pre-cachectic skeletal muscle transcriptional remodelling in a stage-resolved Colon-26 (C26) model in male and female BALB/c mice. Tibialis anterior muscle was collected at the pre-cachectic stage (tumour palpable, prior to overt hindlimb muscle mass loss) from tumour-bearing mice and sex-matched sham controls (n=4/group; 16 samples total).

Poly(A)-selected stranded bulk RNA sequencing (150 bp paired-end; Illumina NovaSeq X Plus) was performed to identify early tumour-associated gene expression changes and sexually dimorphic responses. Reads were aligned to the Mus musculus reference genome (mm39/GRCm39) and gene-level counts were generated for differential expression analysis. Differential expression was assessed using edgeR with TMM normalisation and false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.05.