How does our body control time?

Our alarm clock can instantly be adjusted for an extra hour on March 9, but our biological clock needs a longer time to adjust to changes because of the watch. Our biology is tightly bound to many physiological and behavioral processes.

Researchers have discovered rhythmic activities once a day, a 24-hour cycle that keeps our bodies on time, thought to be related to sleep, weight gain, and confusion. psychological state, and some diseases. Today, they have made significant progress in identifying neurologic genes and pathways involved in controlling our circadian clock. On the basis of these studies can lead us to find new treatments to treat insomnia, fatigue after a long flight, depression, obesity and diseases. other.

Recent advances in the study of activities that take place once a day continue. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a division of the National Institute of Health, supported these basic studies and is supporting research in other areas of activity. Out once a day.

Do you gain weight? Check your biological clock

Recent research results show that activities that occur once a day are closely related to weight gain. When Carla Green and her collaborators at the University of Virginia gave rats a high-protein, high-fat, non-protein diet related to once-a-day activities, they found It turns out that mice lacking this protein increase their weight quite seriously while mice with this protein double their body weight. The results of the experiment showed that once-a-day activities controlled metabolic processes associated with weight gain diets.

The watch in the box

Carl Johnson and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University recreated an artificial biological clock using three proteins. An artificial clock will follow a 24-hour operation, and it will maintain this cycle in a temperature range. This is a defined but still incomplete feature of activities that occur once a day. This progress has created an unprecedented opportunity to study the mechanism of the biological clock, the role of temperature in controlling daily cycles and even the development of The activity only happens once in a day of humans.

A change of biological clock activation.

In a surprising finding, Dr. Paolo Sassone-Corsi of the University of California-Irvine and his colleagues discovered that just changing an amino acid in a protein would cause a series of gene events to occur. related to the maintenance of the biological clock. If the change is destroyed, it can interrupt the next sequence of events and it will play the role as a major element of the disease related to activities that occur only once a day. That amino acid may also be the new target for the body's biological clock control compounds.