ABSTRACT: 1 year-old male Tenascin-C deficient 129/SV mice with the targeted insertion of a beta-lactamase cassette in the NcoI site of exon 2 of the TNC gene (Forsberg, E., Hirsch, E., Frohlich, L., Meyer, M., Ekblom, P., Aszodi, A., Werner, S. & Fassler, R. (1996) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci U. S. A 93, 6594-6599) were used for the study. Animals were derived from the original strain and back-crossed with wildtype 129/SV mice (Institut für Labortierkunde, University of Zurich). Animals were acclimatized to housing in single cages for one week followed by 7 days of hindlimb suspension and one day of reloading. Soleus muscle was harvested, total RNA isolated and subjected to transcript profiling with custom microarrays with custom-designed ATLASTM cDNA nylon filter as described (Dapp, C., Schmutz, S., Hoppeler, H. & Fluck, M. (2004) Physiol Genomics 20, 97-107). Keywords: Transcriptome