Summary Circadian rhythms and cellular metabolism are intimately linked. Here we reveal that a high-fat diet (HFD) generates a profound reorganization of specific metabolic pathways, leading to widespread remodeling of the liver clock. Strikingly, in addition to disrupting the normal circadian cycle, HFD causes an unexpectedly large-scale genesis of de novo oscillating transcripts, resulting in reorganization of the coordinated oscillations between coherent transcripts and metabolites. The mechanisms underlying this reprogramming involve both the impairment of CLOCK:BMAL1 chromatin recruitment, and a pronounced cyclic activation of surrogate pathways through the transcriptional regulator PPARγ. Finally, we demonstrate that it is specifically the nutritional challenge, and not the development of obesity, that causes the reprogramming of the clock and that the effects of the diet on the clock are reversible.

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Metabolic diseases are often characterized by circadian misalignment in different tissues, yet how altered coordination and communication among tissue clocks relate to specific pathogenic mechanisms remains largely unknown. Applying an integrated systems biology approach, we performed 24-hr metabolomics profiling of eight mouse tissues simultaneously. We present a temporal and spatial atlas of circadian metabolism in the context of systemic energy balance and under chronic nutrient stress (high-fat diet [HFD]). Comparative analysis reveals how the repertoires of tissue metabolism are linked and gated to specific temporal windows and how this highly specialized communication and coherence among tissue clocks is rewired by nutrient challenge. Overall, we illustrate how dynamic metabolic relationships can be reconstructed across time and space and how integration of circadian metabolomics data from multiple tissues can improve our understanding of health and disease.

SUMMARY Circadian rhythms are intimately linked to cellular metabolism. Specifically, the NAD+-dependent deacetylase SIRT1, the founding member of the sirtuin family, contributes to clock function. Whereas SIRT1 exhibits diversity in deacetylation targets and subcellular localization, SIRT6 is the only constitutively chromatin-associated sirtuin and is prominently present at transcriptionally active genomic loci. Comparison of the hepatic circadian transcriptomes reveals that SIRT6 and SIRT1 separately control transcriptional specificity and therefore define distinctly partitioned classes of circadian genes. SIRT6 interacts with CLOCK:BMAL1 and, differently from SIRT1, governs their chromatin recruitment to circadian gene promoters. Moreover, SIRT6 controls circadian chromatin recruitment of SREBP-1, resulting in the cyclic regulation of genes implicated in fatty acid and cholesterol metabolism. This mechanism parallels a phenotypic disruption in fatty acid metabolism in SIRT6 null mice as revealed by circadian metabolome analyses. Thus, genomic partitioning by two independent sirtuins contributes to differential control of circadian metabolism.

Background Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a powerful tool for studying complex biological systems, such as tumor heterogeneity and tissue microenvironments. However, the sources of technical and biological variation in primary solid tumor tissues and patient-derived mouse xenografts for scRNA-seq are not well understood. Results We use low temperature (6 °C) protease and collagenase (37 °C) to identify the transcriptional signatures associated with tissue dissociation across a diverse scRNA-seq dataset comprising 155,165 cells from patient cancer tissues, patient-derived breast cancer xenografts, and cancer cell lines. We observe substantial variation in standard quality control metrics of cell viability across conditions and tissues. From the contrast between tissue protease dissociation at 37 °C or 6 °C, we observe that collagenase digestion results in a stress response. We derive a core gene set of 512 heat shock and stress response genes, including FOS and JUN, induced by collagenase (37 °C), which are minimized by dissociation with a cold active protease (6 °C). While induction of these genes was highly conserved across all cell types, cell type-specific responses to collagenase digestion were observed in patient tissues. Conclusions The method and conditions of tumor dissociation influence cell yield and transcriptome state and are both tissue- and cell-type dependent. Interpretation of stress pathway expression differences in cancer single-cell studies, including components of surface immune recognition such as MHC class I, may be especially confounded. We define a core set of 512 genes that can assist with the identification of such effects in dissociated scRNA-seq experiments.