Light-cycle time-restricted feeding remodels a hidden layer of the cardiac transcriptome through sex-specific transcript switching

Authors

Naidu, S., Prabhat, A., Peck, B., Seward, T. S., Schroder, E., Delisle, B., Wen, Y.

Abstract

Light-cycle time-restricted feeding disrupts daily cardiovascular and thermoregulatory rhythms, but the molecular effects of light-cycle time-restricted feeding on the heart have been measured only at the level of total gene expression. We used Oxford Nanopore long-read RNA sequencing to resolve the full-length ventricular transcriptome from male and female mice under ad libitum feeding or light-cycle time-restricted feeding across the 24-hour cycle. Greater than 20% of cardiac transcripts represent unannotated variants of known genes absent from the current GENCODE reference annotation. Light-cycle time-restricted feeding reorganizes transcript usage across hundreds of genes, including genes encoding splicing regulators, largely without changing total gene expression. The genes affected are sex-specific, with fewer than 2% of changes shared at the gene, transcript, and transcript-usage levels. We show that transcript-level regulation is a previously underrecognized component of the cardiac response to altered feeding behavior, undetected by conventional short-read approaches.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 29 Sep 2026.

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