Abstract

Animals anticipate the timing of food availability via the food-entrainable oscillator (FEO). The anatomical location and timekeeping mechanism of the FEO are unknown. Several studies showed the circadian gene, Period 2, is critical for FEO timekeeping. However, other studies concluded that canonical circadian genes are not essential for FEO timekeeping. In this study, we re-examined the effects of the Per2Brdm1 mutation on food entrainment using methods that have revealed robust food anticipatory activity in other mutant lines. We examined food anticipatory activity, which is the output of the FEO, in single Period mutant mice. Single Per1, Per2, and Per3 mutant mice had robust food anticipatory activity during restricted feeding. In addition, we found that two different lines of Per2 mutant mice (ldc and Brdm1) anticipated restricted food availability. To determine if FEO timekeeping persisted in the absence of the food cue, we assessed activity during fasting. Food anticipatory (wheel-running) activity in all Period mutant mice was also robust during food deprivation. Together, our studies demonstrate that the Period genes are not necessary for the expression of food anticipatory activity.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-14-2017

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Scientific Reports, v. 7, article no. 15510, p. 1-8.

© The Author(s) 2017

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15332-6

Funding Information

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R21NS099809 (to S.Y.), P20GM103527 (to J.S.P.), K01DK098321 (to J.S.P.), R03DK098321 (to J.S.P.), National Science Foundation grant IOS-1146908 (to S.Y.), an American Physiological Society Undergraduate Research Fellowship (to R.H.W.), and the University of Kentucky.

Related Content

Supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15332-6.

41598_2017_15332_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (3995 kB)
Supplementary Information

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