Circadian clock sensitive to vibration
10 Mar 2014 by Evoluted New Media
The internal circadian clock of the fruit fly can be influenced by more than just the cycle of night and day say researchers in London, who found vibration also has a part to play.
The study – published in Science – suggests that an animal’s own movement could influence its body clock.
Researchers from University College London (UCL) and Queen Mary, University of London exposed Drosophila to 12-hour cycles of vibration and silence, and found that these cycles were enough to synchronise the fly’s internal clock and corresponding daily locomotor activity.
“In a nutshell, our research shows that, in flies, the biological clock which regulates most bodily functions can be set – or entrained – not only by light and temperature, but also by mechanical stimuli that excited sensory receptors in the body,” said Dr Joerg Albert, a senior author on the study from UCL Ear Institute.
Albert says the research now encourages further study into the genetic and cellular basis of how the circadian clock is set. Evidence in humans and mammals has been sporadic and inconclusive to show if and how movement – such as scheduled physical exercise – can reset the clock.
“Our experiments offer a novel pathway for setting the circadian clock that may well be relevant for the treatment of clock related diseases, such as insomnia, depression and bipolar disorder,” said Professor Ralf Stanewsky from the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL.
“It also offers a novel way to set the circadian clock using movement as well as extrinsic entrainment such as ambient light and temperature fluctuations,” he continued. “It could point to the existence of an animal’s internal ‘own time’ that might have to be negotiated with the external ‘world time’.”
