PER Protein in Silkmoths Marches to Different Drummer

摘要

It's quite a feat to take one tiny pendulum and design two completely different clocks around it. But that may be what nature has done in building the molecular clocks that control daily rhythms in two different insects. After working out the mechanism of one clock, in the fruit fly Drosophila mel-anogaster, researchers expected that their results might be widely applicable. But in this month's issue of Neuron, Steven Reppert and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School report that they have taken alook at the probable timekeeper in a different insect, the silkmoth Antheraea pernyi. The same key protein oscillator is there all right, but it seems to play a completely different role.