Research

Hormonal

Skeletal muscle-specific ablation of the core clock gene Bmal1 causes impaired insulin-stimulated glucose uptake and reduced glucose oxidation, primarily through reduced protein levels of GLUT4 and TBC1D1 and altered pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) activity.

Your muscles have an internal clock that prepares them to process glucose efficiently during your active/feeding phases. Disrupting this rhythm (e.g., through irregular sleep or eating times) may impair your muscles' ability to take up glucose in response to insulin, even if you are not overweight. Maintaining consistent sleep and meal timing supports optimal muscle insulin sensitivity.

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Skeletal muscles from these mice showed impaired insulin-stimulated glucose uptake with reduced protein levels of GLUT4, the insulin-dependent glucose transporter, and TBC1D1, a Rab-GTPase involved in GLUT4 translocation. Pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) activity was also reduced due to altered expression of circadian genes Pdk4 and Pdp1... The impaired glucose metabolism induced by muscle-specific Bmal1 knockout suggests that a major physiological role of the muscle clock is to prepare for the transition from the rest/fasting phase to the active/feeding phase, when glucose becomes the predominant fuel for skeletal muscle.
Kenneth A. Dyar et al. · Molecular Metabolism · 2013

Why this rating

High-quality experimental design using conditional and inducible mouse models with rigorous molecular and functional assays, though limited to murine models.

Source

Muscle insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism are controlled by the intrinsic muscle clock

Kenneth A. Dyar et al. · Molecular Metabolism · 2013

DOI 10.1016/j.molmet.2013.10.005

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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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