body clock tagged posts

Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered the secret to regulating our internal clock. They identified that this regulator sits right at the tail end of Casein Kinase 1 delta (CK1δ), a protein which acts as a pacesetter for our internal biological clock or the natural 24-hour cycles that control sleep-wake patterns and other daily functions, known as circadian rhythm.

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Biologists from The University of Manchester have explained for the first time why having a good night’s sleep really could prepare us for the rigours of the day ahead. The study in mice and published in Nature Cell Biology, shows how the body clock mechanism boosts our ability to maintain our bodies when we are most active.

And because we know the body clock is less precise as we age, the discovery, argues lead author Professor Karl Kadler, may one day help unlock some of the mysteries of aging.

The discovery throws fascinating light on the body’s extracellular matrix -which provides structural and biochemical support to cells in the form of connective tissue such as bone, skin, tendon and cartilage.

Over half our body weight is matrix, and half of this is collagen – and sci...

In this slice of the master clock, cells expressing an astrocyte-specific structural protein that had been stained red (top right panel) matched up well with cells that had been equipped to fluoresce green when they were expressing a clock gene (middle right panel), demonstrating that the scientists could watch astrocytes tick in the clock. Credit: Herzog Lab

Until recently, work on biological clocks that dictate daily fluctuations in most body functions, including core body temperature and alertness, focused on neurons, those electrically excitable cells that are the divas of the central nervous system. Asked to define the body’s master clock, biologists would say it is the suprachiasmatic nuclei, or SCN – in the brain that consist of 20,000 neurons...

We really can’t have our astronauts getting loopy after just a few weeks on-planet, though, so researchers have been trying to find a way to re-program the body’s sleep cycle to the Martian standard. One method showing promise is the use of light-therapy — not just using bright light to knock the rhythm off kilter, but using the light’s specific wave-length as well. Extending the human sleep cycle might be as simple as exposing an astronaut to pale blue light at the end of their day. They hope to continue their research and determine which wavelengths have have an effect and what that is at different times of the day. http://www.geek.com/science/mars-explorers-may-suffer-never-ending-jet-lag-1616740/

New research reveals the importance of a circadian body clock that matches the r...