Circadian rhythms in metabolic variables in Caenorhabditis elegans

Circadian rhythms govern a wide variety of physiological and metabolic functions in most organisms through neural networks, hormones and gene expression.

In this work, we studied the circadian variation in metabolic variables of adult C elegans such as food consumption, pharyngeal contractions, defecation and oxygen consumption. Feeding behavior was clearly rhythmic under LD conditions, with a non-significant trend under DD conditions. In addition, a daily and circadian variation in muscle contraction of the pharynx was observed. Oxygen consumption also showed a circadian fluctuation with a maximum in the middle of the night (a peak was found around ZT18/CT18). Furthermore, defecation behavior also showed a daily variation in the N2 strain (wild type). This work demonstrates that in the adult nematode C. elegans metabolic variables vary daily. In summary, our results will allow us to take full advantage of this widely used animal model (including research in genetics, ageing and developmental biology) for studies in Chronobiology. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.