Researchers Created the Couch Potato Mouse

There were a lot of articles about PGC-1 in the past years, pretending that induction of PGC-1 exerts many positive effects. Recent research raises however some doubts about that. This article alrerady shows that PGC-1 is not that important as suggested so far. Moreover, more and more negative effects of inducing PGC-1 in skeletal muscle turn out. E.g one paper has reported increased atrophy in response to overexpression of PGC-1alpha (Miura S et al, Am J Pathol. 2006 ), another one demonstrated increased lipid accumulation in muslce (Summermatter S et al, JBC 2010) and a further one found elevated inflammation because PGC-1 induces TNFalpha production and secretion (Olesen J et al, Medicine

I think there are now enough articles published on PGC-1. One has to say that in this pecular field a lot of data are researched in ways which have to be doubted scientifically. People try hard to link everything possible to PGC-1.
A good example is the recent hype linking PGC-1 to inflammation where people do cell culture experiments, since this is just fast.
but many things are just not considered. It's poor research.
-Multiplicity of infection (MOI): Some researchers use adenovirus in culture. This will stress the cells and have inflammatory action.
-They don’t considered that putting a control virus and a PGC-1 expressing virus without exactly knowing the viral loads and how many infectious particles are added per cell is simply wrong.


-Massive overexpression with adenovirus results in unphysiological expression Forced interaction through physical overabundance is unspecific and does not reflect the interactions in reality: No interaction conclusion possible based on such findings.

-Modified PGCs (mycHis or flag tagged) used for experiments: Using tagged proteins will not give reliable results. Tagging will lead to conformational changes of the protein and then different behavior than native protein

-Use of antibiotics in cell culture : alters inflammatory response

The criticism deposited here is definitively justified. A recent article by Olesen et al in PLoS One shows that mice that overexpress PGC-1 alpha in the muscle have elevated levels of TNFalpha.
Honestly, there is certainly no direct role of PGC-1 in inflammation.
Somewhere I saw even a poster presentation pretending that PGC-1 beta has anti-inflammatory effects. Absolut nonsense the mice that overexpress PGC-1beta massively overexpress PGC-1beta. Like Miura has shown for PGC-1alpha that a too high expression has negative effects, the massive overexpression of PGC-1beta in that mouse model is detrimental (severe atrophy).
People often use RT-PCR to measure some pro or antiinflammatory genes. But this method is too sensitive. Sometimes something from the background is just amplified a bit more than other things from the backgound and oops, people see increased or decreased levels.
Nobody has shown a real role for PGC-1 in muscle and infalmmation. It's all artefacts