Project description:The circadian clock orchestrates rhythms in physiology and behavior, allowing the organism to adapt to daily environmental changes. Recently, efforts have been made to unravel the connection between the circadian clock and metabolism and to understand how the peripheral clock in different organs coordinates circadian responses to maintain metabolic homeostasis. It is becoming clear that diet can influence diurnal rhythms, however, the molecular mechanisms responsible for alterations in daily oscillations and how tissue-specific clocks interpret a nutritional challenge are not well understood. Here, we reveal tissue-specific circadian plasticity in response to a ketogenic diet (KD) in both the liver and intestine and a remarkable deviation within these two tissues following subsequent carbohydrate supplementation. KD caused a dramatic change in the circadian transcriptome in both liver and intestine in a tissue-specific fashion. In particular, both the amplitude of clock genes as well as specific BMAL1 recruitment was profoundly altered by KD while the intestinal clock was devoid of such plasticity. While PPARG nuclear accumulation was circadian in both tissues, it showed substantial phase specificity as did downstream targets. Finally, the gut and liver clocks had distinct responses to carbohydrate supplementation to KD composition, suggesting a higher plasticity in the ileum whose gene expression was almost restored to control baseline. For the first time our results demonstrate how nutrients modulate clock function in a tissue-specific manner, suggesting that a food stress arouses unique circadian molecular signatures in distinct peripheral tissues.
Project description:Circadian rhythms regulate diverse aspects of gastrointestinal physiology ranging from the composition of microbiota to motility. However, development of the intestinal circadian clock and detailed molecular mechanisms regulating circadian physiology of the intestine remain largely unknown. The lack of appropriate human model systems that enable organ- and/or diseasespecific interrogation of clock functions is a major obstacle hindering advancements of translational applications using chronotherapy. In this report, we show that both pluripotent stem cell-derived human intestinal organoids engrafted into mice and patient-derived human intestinal enteroids (HIEs) possess robust circadian rhythms, and demonstrate circadian phase-dependent necrotic cell death responses to Clostridium difficile toxin B (TcdB). Intriguingly, mouse and human enteroids demonstrate anti-phasic necrotic cell death responses. RNA-Seq data show ~4% of genes are rhythmically expressed in HIEs. Remarkably, we observe anti-phasic gene expression of Rac1, a small GTPase directly inactivated by TcdB, between mouse and human enteroids. Importantly, the observed circadian time-dependent necrotic cell death response is abolished in both mouse enteroids and human intestinal organoids (HIOs) lacking robust circadian rhythms. Our findings uncover robust functions of circadian rhythms regulating critical clock-controlled genes (CCGs) in human enteroids governing organism-specific, circadian phasedependent necrotic cell death responses. Our data highlight unique differences between mouse and human enteroids, and lay a foundation for human organ- and disease-specific investigation of clock functions using human organoids for translational applications.