bims-ciryme 2024-02-11 papers

Issue of 2024‒02‒11
two papers selected by
Gabriela Da Silva Xavier, University of Birmingham

Cell Metab. 2024 Jan 31. pii: S1550-4131(24)00009-3. [Epub ahead of print]

Interorgan rhythmicity as a feature of healthful metabolism.

The finding that animals with circadian gene mutations exhibit diet-induced obesity and metabolic syndrome with hypoinsulinemia revealed a distinct role for the clock in the brain and peripheral tissues. Obesogenic diets disrupt rhythmic sleep/wake patterns, feeding behavior, and transcriptional networks, showing that metabolic signals reciprocally control the clock. Providing access to high-fat diet only during the sleep phase (light period) in mice accelerates weight gain, whereas isocaloric time-restricted feeding during the active period enhances energy expenditure due to circadian induction of adipose thermogenesis. This perspective focuses on advances and unanswered questions in understanding the interorgan circadian control of healthful metabolism.

Keywords: circadian; diabetes; epigenetics; insulin; metabolism; molecular clock; obesity; sleep; thermogenesis; transcription

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2024.01.009

Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2024 Feb 09.

Analysis of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms from Drosophila Activity-Monitoring Data Using SCAMP.

Christopher G Vecsey, Casey Koochagian, Maria T Porter, Gregg Roman, Divya Sitaraman.

Sleep is a fundamental feature of life for virtually all multicellular animals, but many questions remain about how sleep is regulated and what biological functions it plays. Substantial headway has been made in the study of both circadian rhythms and sleep in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, much of it through studies of individual fly activity using beam break counts from Drosophila activity monitors (DAMs). The number of laboratories worldwide studying sleep in Drosophila has grown from only a few 20 years ago to hundreds today. The utility of these studies is limited by the quality of the metrics that can be extracted from the data. Many software options exist to help analyze DAM data; however, these are often expensive or have significant limitations. Therefore, we describe here a method for analyzing DAM-based data using the sleep and circadian analysis MATLAB program (SCAMP). This user-friendly software has an advantage of combining several analyses of both sleep and circadian rhythms in one package and produces graphical outputs as well as spreadsheets of the outputs for further statistical analysis. The version of SCAMP described here is also the first published software package that can analyze data from multibeam DAM5Ms, enabling determination of positional preference over time.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/pdb.prot108182