Back

An obligatory role for AgRP neurons in maintaining body temperature during time-restricted feeding

Su, C.; Cai, J.; Xu, Y.; Arenkiel, B.; Tong, Q.

2025-12-19 neuroscience
10.64898/2025.12.16.694714 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Homeotherms maintain a steady body temperature through thermoregulation, a process critical for survival during fasting, in which the brain has to defend energy-costly body temperature while reducing energy expenditure to conserve energy reserve; however, the neural basis for defending body temperature remains unclear. Here, we demonstrated that AgRP neuron lesion led to lethality during time-restricted feeding but no obvious impact on HFD-induced obesity or obesity-reducing responses to glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonism. The lesion disrupted adaptive feeding behaviors during time-restricted feeding and reduced motivational feeding. Notably, the lethality was caused by hypothermia instead of reduced food intake. The lesion also caused failure in body temperature maintenance during acute fasting in cold. Fasting-induced activation in AgRP neurons was abrogated when mice were placed in a warm environment. Our results identify the physiological role for AgRP neurons in defending body temperature during restricted feeding but dispensable for body weight regulation with food ad libitum.

Published in Metabolism (predicted rank #26) · training set

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.