By Meghan Rosen
A run-in with Salmonella may be worse at dawn than at dusk, at least for mice.
Mice fed the nasty bacteria, a common cause of food poisoning, in the morning came down with a more severe infection than mice fed at night, researchers report May 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This is the first study that has infected mammals with a pathogen and seen this effect,” says Laura Roden, a molecular chronobiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who has found a similar phenomenon in plants. Other researchers have also observed clock-driven immune responses in fruit flies.