Sensory conflict disrupts circadian rhythms in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, United States
Abstract
Circadian clocks infer time of day by integrating information from cyclic environmental factors called zeitgebers, including light and temperature. Single zeitgebers entrain circadian rhythms, but few studies have addressed how multiple, simultaneous zeitgeber cycles interact to affect clock behavior. Misalignment between zeitgebers ('sensory conflict') can disrupt circadian rhythms, or alternatively clocks may privilege information from one zeitgeber over another. Here, we show that temperature cycles modulate circadian locomotor rhythms in Nematostella vectensis, a model system for cnidarian circadian biology. We conduct behavioral experiments across a comprehensive range of light and temperature cycles and find that Nematostella's circadian behavior is disrupted by chronic misalignment between light and temperature, which involves disruption of the endogenous clock itself rather than a simple masking effect. Sensory conflict also disrupts the rhythmic transcriptome, with numerous genes losing rhythmic expression. However, many metabolic genes remained rhythmic and in-phase with temperature, and other genes even gained rhythmicity, implying that some rhythmic metabolic processes persist even when behavior is disrupted. Our results show that a cnidarian clock relies on information from light and temperature, rather than prioritizing one signal over the other. Although we identify limits to the clock’s ability to integrate conflicting sensory information, there is also a surprising robustness of behavioral and transcriptional rhythmicity.
Data availability
Raw RNA-seq data have been uploaded to the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA), Bioproject PRJNA826898.R code used for analysis is available athttps://github.com/caberger1/Sensory-Conflict-in-Nematostella-vectensis.
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Sensory conflict in Nematostella vectensisNCBI Bioproject PRJNA826898.
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Nematostella vectensis diurnal transcriptomesNCBI Bioproject PRJNA246707.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Ocean Ventures Fund)
- Cory A Berger
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Berger & Tarrant
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Sensory conflict disrupts circadian rhythms in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis
eLife 12:e81084.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81084
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