Five-step wavelet approach to detect and characterize changes in the dynamics of wheel running and food intake behaviors in mice subjected to feed restriction.

JACKELYN M. KEMBRO; ANA GEORGINA FLESIA; PAULA SOFIA NIETO

La Plata

Congreso; XIX Congreso Regional de Física Estadística y Aplicaciones a la Materia Condensada (TREFEMAC 2022); 2022

Universidad Nacional de La Plata

The temporal dynamics of behavior is complex because it reects processes occurringat dierent temporal and spatial scales, susceptible to perturbations by external factors.Locomotor activity in mammals presents circadian (i.e. approx. 24h) rhythms and otherdynamical patterns, specically, the ultradian rhythms (URs, i.e. rhythms with periodshorter than 24h) and long-range auto-correlation. These patterns can be dierentiallyaected by environmental perturbations. Identifying changes in such patterns is importantto understand behavioral adaptation to the environment. Specically, how animalsare fed can have an important impact not only on the animal's behavioral dynamics butalso in their physiology and health. Yet, there are no clear tools to characterize and quantifythese dynamical perturbations at dierent behavioral scales.Thus, herein, we analyzebehavioral time series of food intake and wheel running behaviors derived from mice thatare either fed ad-libitum (i.e. without restrictions) or exposed to temporal restriction offeeding (TR) or caloric restriction (CR) throughout a 42-day experiment. Since mice aremostly nocturnal, feed restrictions were either applied during the daytime or nighttimeto evaluate the impact of time at which such restriction paradigms were applied. Speci-cally, we applied a 5-step wavelet approach to detect and characterize behavioral rhythmsand detrended uctuation analysis (DFA) to assess changes in auto-correlation properties.We found that TR and CR dierentially modulates the acrophase and strength (power)of circadian rhythms in both running wheel and food intake activity. As expected, daytimeTR and CR induced an abrupt change of phase and a transitory decrease in powerof the circadian food-intake rhythm, consistent with a transitional state associated withthe perturbation induced by the change in feeding paradigme. Importantly, the waveletapproach we propose allows us to detect ultradian rhythms in feed-intake and wheel runningtime series previously unreported. Also, we were able to show, for the rst time,how to characterize the persistence, prevalence and robustness of these URs. Noteworthy,our characterization showed a dependence on the behavior studied, feeding paradigmand individual genetic/metabolic backgrounds. In addition, we detect long-range correlationsin the wheel-running, but not in feed-intake for scales shorter than 100 min and,surprisingly, the correlation properties were susceptible to be modulated by the feedingparadigm. We conclude that the feed paradigm aects the temporal dynamics of behaviorover a broad range of temporal scale, highlighting the diversity of behavioral patterns beyondthe circadian activity, building