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Elucidation of daily timed-palatable meal-anticipatory activity in the circadian system of mice

Taufique SKT, Eischeid A, Magaña I, Ehichioya DE, Farah S, Obata Y, Yamazaki S

American journal of physiology. Gastrointestinal and liver physiology, 2026

2 citations

Abstract

Anticipation of daily recurring changes in the environment is critical for survival. When food access is limited to a few hours during the daytime, nocturnal rodents exhibit food-anticipatory activity, which appears a few hours before scheduled mealtime. The rodents are also known to exhibit anticipatory activity for time-restricted palatable meals under ad libitum access to chow. When 1 h of chocolate chip access was given during the day, mice exhibited robust anticipatory activity. In contrast, despite the peanut butter-fed mice eating two times the calories of peanut butter than the chocolate-fed mice did of chocolate chips, we observed only negligible anticipatory activity for daily 1-h peanut butter administration. In ex vivo explants, the phase of the liver in mice subjected to timed-chocolate chip access was significantly advanced, similarly to that in mice subjected to 4-h restricted feeding during the day. Similar to anticipatory activity, negligible phase changes in the liver were observed in the mice given 1 h of peanut butter access during the day. Therefore, robustness of palatable meal-anticipatory activity and phase advance in the liver are unlikely to be in direct response to increased calorie intake during the day. We measured food-seeking nose-poking behavior during food deprivation following daily 1-h chocolate chip access. Mice expressed anticipatory food seeking around the time that they had previously been given daily chocolate chips. This suggests that…

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