Biological clock: Find the time-controlling gene in C.elegans

It was just a worm, a small nematode that lived in the soil - but was of great significance for biomedical and biological cycles, and was presented in a recent study by researcher Alexander. van der Linden of Reno University, Nevada . Caenorhabditis elegans article on day and night rhythm has been published in peer review journal, PloS Biology.

' Biological rhythms are important for all organisms because they regulate biological functions such as food absorption, temperature, metabolic rate and sleep ,' Vander Linden said. ' The detection of time-control genes in C. Elegans will lead to a new role of worms in the study, and lead to an understanding of the biological clock '.

For more than two decades, researchers have questioned whether C. Elegan, one of the leading research specimens, has a biological clock. The circadian rhythm behaviors previously described in C. Elegans are variable and difficult to quantify, and no gene has been known to represent a 24-hour oscillation cycle as seen in other species.

Now, a research team has discovered genes that control time in C. Elegans in both light and temperature. The group is led by biology professors Piali Sengupta and Michael Rosbash at Brandeis University, Waltham and lead author Van der Linden - a former postdoctoral member in the Sengupta laboratory, now an associate professor of the College Reno University of Nevada science.

'C. Elegans offers many advantages to studying the function of human pathogens through the corresponding genes of worms. Now we not only have a new specimen to study an important biological clock, but we can also study how the clock evolves over time, since the nematode and humans split about 600 to 1200 million. last year.' - Van de Linden said.

Most organisms on Earth exhibit circadian rhythms - repetitive periodic behaviors or repeated gene expression every 24 hours . These rhythms are created by a biological clock - an internal time-keeping mechanism - that can be affected and synchronized by environmental signals such as temperature or light / dark cycle.

Van de Linden adds: ' With a small and evenly distributed neuronal system, combined with a variety of genetic tools and behavioral testing, C. Elegans is a research object. feasible in the field of circadian rhythms. The next important step will be to determine how the repetitions in the molecule of the worm are related to repetitions of day-to-day periodic behavior . '

Other authors contributing to this work include graduate students Mathew Beverly, Joseph Rodriquez and Sara Wasserman (now a postdoctoral member at UCLA) at Brandeis University, and Sebastian Kadener, a former postdoctoral fellow is an associate professor at Silberman Life Sciences Institute, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel.

The work is supported by the National Institutes of Health, a training grant of the IGERT National Science Foundation, a Long-Term Human Science Science Program, and Career Development Award (SK). and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (MR).