At the single cell level, we also unexpectedly found that the majority of tongue-innervating TG neurons from both sham and tumor-bearing mice expressed Atf3, likely from the trigeminal ganglia dissociation process; however, the relative expression was significantly higher in MOC1 tumor-bearing males and in MOC2 tumor- bearing male and female mice compared to sham suggesting that cancer does induce an injury response greater than that of experimental processing. Here, ATF3 is linked to cancer.