SUMMARY While diet-induced obesity has been exclusively attributed to increased caloric intake from fat, animals fed high fat diet (HFD) ad libitum (ad lib) eat frequently throughout day and night disrupting the normal feeding cycle. To test whether obesity and metabolic diseases result from HFD or disruption of metabolic cycles, we subjected mice to either ad lib or time restricted feeding (tRF) of a HFD for 8 h/day. Mice under tRF consume equivalent calories from HFD as those with ad lib access, yet are protected against obesity, hyperinsulinemia, hepatic steatosis, inflammation, and have improved motor coordination. The tRF regimen improved CREB, mTOR and AMPK pathway function and oscillations of the circadian clock and their target genes' expression. These changes in catabolic and anabolic pathways altered liver metabolome, improved nutrient utilization and energy expenditure. We demonstrate in mice that tRF regimen is a non-pharmacological strategy against obesity and associated diseases.

Plasticity of the cell state has been proposed to drive resistance to multiple classes of cancer therapies, thereby limiting their effectiveness1–4. A high-mesenchymal cell state observed in human tumours and cancer cell lines has been associated with resistance to multiple treatment modalities across diverse cancer lineages, but the mechanistic underpinning for this state has remained incompletely understood1–6. Here we molecularly characterize this therapy-resistant high-mesenchymal cell state in human cancer cell lines and organoids and show that it depends on a druggable lipid-peroxidase pathway that protects against ferroptosis, a nonapoptotic form of cell death induced by the build-up of toxic lipid peroxides7,8. We show that this cell state is characterized by activity of enzymes that promote the synthesis of polyunsaturated lipids. These lipids are the substrates for lipid peroxidation by lipoxygenase enzymes8,9. This lipid metabolism creates a dependency on pathways converging on the phospholipid glutathione peroxidase (GPX4), a selenocysteine-containing enzyme that dissipates lipid peroxides and thereby prevents the iron-mediated reactions of peroxides that induce ferroptotic cell death8. Dependency on GPX4 was found to exist across diverse therapy-resistant states characterized by high expression of ZEB1, including epithelial-mesenchymal transition in epithelial-derived carcinomas, TGFβ-mediated therapy- resistance in melanoma, treatment-induced neuroendocrine transdifferentiation in prostate cancer, and sarcomas, which are fixed in a mesenchymal state owing to their cells of origin. We identify vulnerability to ferroptic cell death induced by inhibition of a lipid peroxidase pathway as a feature of therapy-resistant cancer cells across diverse mesenchymal cell-state contexts.

Summary A diurnal rhythm of eating-fasting promotes health, but humans’ eating pattern is rarely assessed. Using a mobile app, we monitored ingestion events in healthy adults with no shift-work for several days. Most subjects ate frequently and erratically throughout wakeful hours and overnight fasting duration paralleled time in bed. There was a bias toward eating late, with estimated <25% calories being consumed before noon and >35% after 6pm. “Metabolic jetlag” resulting from weekday/weekend variation in eating pattern akin to travel across time-zones was prevalent. The daily intake duration (95% interval) exceeded 14.75 h for half the cohort. When overweight individuals with >14 h eating duration ate for only 10–11 h daily for 16 weeks assisted by a data visualization (raster plot of dietary intake pattern, “feedogram”) that we developed, they reduced body weight, reported being energetic, and improved sleep. Benefits persisted for a year.

Changes in cellular gene expression in response to small-molecule or genetic perturbations have yielded signatures that can connect unknown mechanisms of action (MoA) to ones previously established. We hypothesized that differential basal gene expression could be correlated with patterns of small-molecule sensitivity across many cell lines to illuminate the actions of compounds whose MoA are unknown. To test this idea, we correlated the sensitivity patterns of 481 compounds with ~19,000 basal transcript levels across 823 different human cancer cell lines and identified selective outlier transcripts. This process yielded many novel mechanistic insights, including the identification of activation mechanisms, cellular transporters, and direct protein targets. We found that ML239, originally identified in a phenotypic screen for selective cytotoxicity in breast cancer stem-like cells, most likely acts through activation of fatty acid desaturase 2 (FADS2). These data and analytical tools are available to the research community through the Cancer Therapeutics Response Portal.

In mammals, the circadian oscillator generates approximately 24-h rhythms in feeding behavior, even under constant environmental conditions. Livers of mice held under constant darkness exhibit circadian rhythm in abundance in up to 15% of expressed transcripts. Therefore, oscillations in hepatic transcripts could be driven by rhythmic food intake or sustained by the hepatic circadian oscillator, or a combination of both. To address this question, we used distinct feeding and fasting paradigms on wild-type (WT) and circadian clock-deficient mice. We monitored temporal patterns of feeding and hepatic transcription. Both food availability and the temporal pattern of feeding determined the repertoire, phase, and amplitude of the circadian transcriptome in WT liver. In the absence of feeding, only a small subset of transcripts continued to express circadian patterns. Conversely, temporally restricted feeding restored rhythmic transcription of hundreds of genes in oscillatordeficient mouse liver. Our findings show that both temporal pattern of food intake and the circadian clock drive rhythmic transcription, thereby highlighting temporal regulation of hepatic transcription as an emergent property of the circadian system. CREB ͉ metabolism ͉ mouse liver ͉ circadian rhythms