If you mess with a baby bee's gut bacteria, its brain never actually develops a biological clock.
bioRxiv · March 13, 2026 · 2025.09.30.678393
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Why it matters
While we know gut health affects behavior, this study shows it is actually required for the physical growth of 'clock' neurons. Without the right microbes in their gut, the bees never develop the neural hardware needed to tell time and maintain a sleep-wake cycle.
From the abstract
Disruption in gut microbiota during the early postnatal period can disrupt normal neural development and result in long-term behavioral alterations (1). Similar to other neural systems, the circadian clock mechanism continues to mature after birth (2), yet how microbial disturbances in the early period influence the onset of circadian rhythms and the development of central clock mechanisms remains poorly understood. Here we studied whether early life gut dysbiosis affects the ontogeny of behavio