Daily rhythms of home cage activity in young adult male mice under time-restrictive feeding regimen.

Young adult male mice, surgically implanted with E-mitter probes, were first entrained to a 12∶12 LD photoperiodic cycle for two weeks with food and water available ad libitum. Then mice were fed time-restrictively as schematized in Figure 1 for 4 weeks and returned to being fed ad libitum. Home cage activity (HCA) was continuously recorded for 7 subsequent weeks (See M&M). (A) Representative double-plot actograms of HCA in AF, DF, and NF mice. Dark rectangles above the actograms indicate the 12 h scotophase maintained throughout the experiment. (B) Daily patterns of HCA during the time-restrictive feeding. To generate the daily pattern of HCA, monitoring results for the whole time-restrictive period were summed up as 1 h bins and the resulting 28 day profiles were pooled according to the indicated ZT to generate the averaged daily pattern (mean ± S.E.M.). Statistical analyses are summarized in Table 1. (C) Changes in daily HCA during the weeks of entrainment period (EP), 4 weeks of time-restrictive feeding (TR) and when returned to ad libitum feeding for 2 weeks (RA).