Consistently, by gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) of 12-h gene oscillations against the gene expression profiles of human NAFLD patients that have been previously published31, we found that human NAFLD progression, but not healthy steatosis, is significantly associated with the 12-h transcriptome (Fig. 2i and Supplementary Fig. 6a, b); this strongly suggests that the 12-h clock could play an important role in the regulation of metabolic homeostasis and its disruption could lead to NAFLD development. This evidence concerns the gene CLOCK and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease.