Tips From The Tip Of The Iceberg

摘要

If you monitor the precise daily onset of wheel-running behaviour in a mouse kept in an environment devoid of time cues, you can predict that, tomorrow, the animal will start running 23.7 hours - not 23.6 hours, not 23.8 hours -from when it started today. This is because, in organisms as diverse as bread mould, fruitflies, mice and humans, a central circadian clock program coordinates multiple behavioural and physiological processes, including movement, sleep and energy balance, on a daily basis, even when the organism is removed from all external time cues such as the daily light-dark cycle. How such circadian processes are regulated at a molecular level has long fascinated scientists. On page 997 of this issue, Alenghat et al.