AUSTIN, Texas The prestigious National Academy of Sciences has honored two University of Texas at Austin faculty members. Neuroscience professor Kristen
World s first fully reversible manipulation of the circadian clock
The Nagoya University Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM) research team of Designated Associate Professor Tsuyoshi Hirota, Postdoctoral Fellow Simon Miller, Professor Kenichiro Itami and graduate student Tsuyoshi Oshima (Research Fellowship for Young Scientists, JSPS), in collaboration with the group of Professor Ben Feringa and Postdoctoral Fellow Dušan Kolarski of Groningen University in the Netherlands, have achieved a world first: fully reversible manipulation of the period of the circadian clock using light, by exchanging part of a compound with a light-activated switch.
Waking in the morning, sleeping at night - the majority of our biological activities repeat within a daily cycle. The internal process which governs this rhythm is known as the circadian clock. While it is understood that the circadian clock is controlled by the combined functions of clock genes and clock proteins, the process