GSE118967
Rhythmic Food Intake Drives Rhythmic Gene Expression More Potently than the Hepatic Circadian Clock in Mice
Virtually every mammalian tissue exhibits rhythmic expression in thousands of genes, which activate tissue-specific processes at appropriate times of the day. Much of this rhythmic expression is thought to be driven cell-autonomously by molecular circadian clocks present throughout the body. However, increasing evidence suggests that systemic signals, and more specifically rhythmic food intake (RFI), can regulate rhythmic gene expression independently of the circadian clock. To determine the relative contribution of cell autonomous clocks versus RFI in the regulation of rhythmic gene expression, we developed a system that allows long-term manipulation of the daily rhythm of food intake in the mouse, and analyzed liver gene expression by RNA-Seq in mice fed ad libitum, only at night, or arrhythmically (mouse eating 1/8th of their daily food intake every 3 hours). We show that 70% of the cycling mouse liver transcriptome loses rhythmicity under arrhythmic feeding. Remarkably, this loss of rhythmic gene expression under arrhythmic feeding is independent of the liver circadian clock, which continues to exhibit normal oscillations in core clock gene expression. Many genes that lose rhythmicity participate in the regulation of metabolic processes such as lipogenesis and glycogenesis, likely contributing to an increased sensitivity to insulin that was observed in arrhythmically-fed mice. We also show that night-restricted feeding significantly increases the number of rhythmically expressed genes as well as the amplitude of the rhythms. Together, these results indicate that metabolic transcription factors control a large fraction of the rhythmic mouse liver transcriptome, and demonstrate that systemic signals driven by rhythmic food intake play a more important role than the cell-autonomous circadian clock in driving rhythms in liver gene expression and metabolic functions. Overall design: 3' mRNA sequencing on mice livers under 4 different feeding paradigms at 6 timepoints in triplicate