Life’s 24 Hour Clock

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This talk describes how research using the fruit fly Drosophila revealed the make-up of the circadian clock. The first clock gene to be detected in any organism, named “period”, was physically isolated by Young in 1984 and screens in his laboratory subsequently identified five additional genes that are each essential for production of circadian rhythms. Interactions among these genes, and their proteins, contribute to a network of molecular oscillations within single cells throughout the body and allow circadian rhythms to align with environmental day/night cycles. Most of the clock genes discovered by Young and his colleagues in Drosophila are also central to the circadian pathways of humans where they promote rhythmic expression of roughly half our genes.

Speaker
Michael Young, Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Genetics, The Rockefeller University