Function of food-entrainable clock neurons in the dorsomedial hypothalamic nucleus

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When food availability is temporally restricted to a fixed time of the day(restricted feeding), animals adapt to this condition within a few days by feeding during the period of food availability and increasing food-seeking activity in the preceding hours. These changes in biological rhythms have been postulated to be brought about by a food-entrainable oscillator(FEO) that is independent of the mammalian master clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus(SCN), although little is known of the physical and molecular substrates of the FEO. In this study, we demonstrated that an SCN-independent FEO in the nervous system requires a clock gene, Bmal1, and plays a critical role in adaptation of circadian locomotor activity and food intake to restricted feeding.