Body Clock: How Do We Keep Time?
Body Clock: How Do We Keep Time?
April 12, 2001 -- How does our body clock keep time, waking us up in the morning even if the alarm doesn't go off, and making us sleepy at night? Exciting new research in mice, reported in the April 13 issue of Science, suggests that individual clocks in different body tissues all keep pace with the master clock in the brain.
"Until recently, the clock center in the brain was considered 'king' in terms of rhythm generation. Now there appear to be comparable peripheral rhythm centers located throughout the body," says Amanda Hunt, PhD, after reviewing the study for WebMD. "This study presents a series of groundbreaking and elegant experiments that answer many pressing questions about these [centers]." Hunt is a research assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
If you've ever had jet lag or had to work a swing shift, you know what it's like to have your body clock thrown out of whack. Some individuals with "night owl" or "morning lark" syndromes are always out of synch with the rest of us, pacing the halls when everyone else is sound asleep at night, or starting to snooze after the six o'clock news.
In neurologic conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, changes in sleep habits may be an early warning sign of problems to come. As skin cells can be easily removed and grown in the laboratory, detecting malfunctioning clocks in these cells might assist in early diagnosis.
"We have a new tool for studying the biological clock," researcher Hitoshi Okamura, MD, PhD, tells WebMD. "We can use this system to discover new factors or compounds affecting our clock." Okamura is a professor of molecular brain science at the Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan.
"This is an important step for diagnostics," Till Roenneberg, MD, PhD, a professor of chronobiology at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Munich, Germany, tells WebMD. "It may allow us to identify [abnormal] biological timing in connection with many diseases, including sleep disorders and depression." Roenneberg was not involved in Okamura's study.
To help us keep awake during the day and asleep at night, the master clock in the brain sets itself by responding to light stimuli entering the brain through specialized light-sensitive cells in the eye. Much as a pendulum clock keeps time by the back-and-forth motion of the pendulum, or a quartz clock by oscillations within a quartz crystal, the brain's clock responds to oscillations within regulatory systems.
Body Clock: How Do We Keep Time?
April 12, 2001 -- How does our body clock keep time, waking us up in the morning even if the alarm doesn't go off, and making us sleepy at night? Exciting new research in mice, reported in the April 13 issue of Science, suggests that individual clocks in different body tissues all keep pace with the master clock in the brain.
"Until recently, the clock center in the brain was considered 'king' in terms of rhythm generation. Now there appear to be comparable peripheral rhythm centers located throughout the body," says Amanda Hunt, PhD, after reviewing the study for WebMD. "This study presents a series of groundbreaking and elegant experiments that answer many pressing questions about these [centers]." Hunt is a research assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
If you've ever had jet lag or had to work a swing shift, you know what it's like to have your body clock thrown out of whack. Some individuals with "night owl" or "morning lark" syndromes are always out of synch with the rest of us, pacing the halls when everyone else is sound asleep at night, or starting to snooze after the six o'clock news.
In neurologic conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, changes in sleep habits may be an early warning sign of problems to come. As skin cells can be easily removed and grown in the laboratory, detecting malfunctioning clocks in these cells might assist in early diagnosis.
"We have a new tool for studying the biological clock," researcher Hitoshi Okamura, MD, PhD, tells WebMD. "We can use this system to discover new factors or compounds affecting our clock." Okamura is a professor of molecular brain science at the Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan.
"This is an important step for diagnostics," Till Roenneberg, MD, PhD, a professor of chronobiology at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Munich, Germany, tells WebMD. "It may allow us to identify [abnormal] biological timing in connection with many diseases, including sleep disorders and depression." Roenneberg was not involved in Okamura's study.
To help us keep awake during the day and asleep at night, the master clock in the brain sets itself by responding to light stimuli entering the brain through specialized light-sensitive cells in the eye. Much as a pendulum clock keeps time by the back-and-forth motion of the pendulum, or a quartz clock by oscillations within a quartz crystal, the brain's clock responds to oscillations within regulatory systems.
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