Journal of pineal researchJun 15, 2023

Interactions between gut microbes, daily body clocks in the brain and liver, immunity, and metabolism under different light-dark cycles

Circadian Biology Weekly Brief ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Updated Apr 1, 2026

Abstract

Irregular light-dark cycles significantly disrupt central circadian clock rhythms and gut microbiome interactions, leading to potential health issues.

Central circadian clock rhythms lost their regular pattern under irregular light-dark cycles.
Peripheral circadian genes in the liver showed minimal changes despite light-dark cycle variations.
Specific gut bacteria were identified as regulators of liver circadian rhythms during irregular light-dark cycles.
Different light-dark cycles impacted immune functions variably, with more pronounced effects on liver immunity than on hypothalamic immunity.
Extreme alterations in light-dark cycles caused greater disruptions to gut health compared to minor adjustments.
Hepatic tryptophan metabolism plays a role in the interaction among gut microbiome, liver, and brain in response to light-dark cycle changes.

Simplified

The accelerated pace of life at present time has resulted in tremendous alterations in living patterns. Changes in diet and eating patterns, in particular, coupled with irregular light-dark (LD) cycles will further induce circadian misalignment and lead to disease. Emerging data has highlighted the regulatory effects of diet and eating patterns on the host-microbe interactions with the circadian clock (CC), immunity, and metabolism. Herein, we studied how LD cycles regulate the homeostatic crosstalk among the gut microbiome (GM), hypothalamic and hepatic CC oscillations, and immunity and metabolism using multiomics approaches. Our data demonstrated that central CC oscillations lost rhythmicity under irregular LD cycles, but LD cycles had minimal effects on diurnal expression of peripheral CC genes in the liver including Bmal1. We further demonstrated that the GM could regulate hepatic circadian rhythms under irregular LD cycles, the candidate bacteria including Limosilactobacillus, Actinomyces, Veillonella, Prevotella, Campylobacter, Faecalibacterium, Kingella, and Clostridia vadinBB60 et al. A comparative transcriptomic study of innate immune genes indicated that different LD cycles had varying effects on immune functions, while irregular LD cycles had greater impacts on hepatic innate immune functions than those in the hypothalamus. Extreme LD cycle alterations (LD0/24 and LD24/0) had worse impacts than slight alterations (LD8/16 and LD16/8), and led to gut dysbiosis in mice receiving antibiotics. Metabolome data also demonstrated that hepatic tryptophan metabolism mediated the homeostatic crosstalk among GM-liver-brain axis in response to different LD cycles. These research findings highlighted that GM could regulate immune and metabolic disorders induced by circadian dysregulation. Further, the data provided potential targets for developing probiotics for individuals with circadian disruption such as shift workers.

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Interactions between gut microbes, daily body clocks in the brain and liver, immunity, and metabolism under different light-dark cycles

Abstract

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