Fig. 3: Properties of the meta-analysis results.

a Forest plot of the effect sizes of PPARGC1A in acute muscle cohorts. Upregulation appears primarily in the 2–5 h time window and is consistent for both endurance and resistance training. b Forest plot of the effect sizes of COL4A1 in the long-term muscle cohorts. Upregulation appears consistently across the cohorts. a–b Rows represent the 95% confidence interval of a fold-change of a cohort in a given time point. Thus, in each interval the center represents the fold-change estimate and the error bars are proportional to the fold-change standard error. Cohort: the ID given to the cohort in this study (see Supplementary Data 1 for details), N: sample size, Type: exercise type, RE: resistance exercise, EE: endurance exercise, Age: mean age in cohort, %M: percent of males in cohort, Time: the time window in hours. Note that a cohort can have multiple rows with the same time window and different fold-changes (e.g., if a study measured both 2 h and 4 h then both time points will be assigned 2–5 h). c The differential expression effects of our selected genes is unique to exercise. Colors represent the different meta-analysis types in the study. For each meta-analysis the effect sizes of our selected genes are presented, once for the exercise cohorts and once for the untrained cohorts. All paired two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum tests were significant at p < 1 × 10⁻⁰⁷ (acute exercise, muscle: 537 genes, p = 1.5 × 10⁻⁸⁸; long-term training, muscle: 441 genes, 3.1 × 10⁻⁶⁸; acute exercise, blood: 37 genes, p = 6.2 × 10⁻⁰⁸). Each boxplot shows the median, and first and third quartiles. The whiskers extend from the hinge to the largest and lowest values, but no further than 1.5 *(the inter-quantile range). d Heatmap of the upregulated genes selected in the acute blood meta-analysis. Columns represent cohorts, with sampling time point post exercise listed for each, and rows are genes. Boxed cells indicate missing values for that particular gene and cohort. All acute blood studies measured the response to endurance exercise in up to 3 h after the bout ended. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.