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I am the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science). My job is to try to motivate you to comment on the papers there. My scientific specialty is chronobiology (circadian rhythms and photoperiodism), with additional interests in comparative physiology, animal behavior and evolution. You can contact me at: Coturnix@gmail.com

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Clock News:

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Sure, if they sleep.

To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms: We systematically varied input parameters related to the number of food and sleep sites, the degree to which food and sleep sites overlap, and the rate at...

Oxytocin and Childbirth. Or not.

When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include...

Flirting under Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night, or, The Secret Night-Life of Fruitflies

As we mentioned just the other day, studying animal behavior is tough as "animals do whatever they darned please". Thus, making sure that everything is controlled for in an experimental setup is of paramount importance. Furthermore, for the studies to...

The Lark-Mouse and the Prometheus-Mouse

Two interesting papers came out last week [from the Archives - click on the clock logo to see the original post], both using transgenic mice to ask important questions about circadian organization in mammals. Interestingly, in both cases the gene...

Eight Hours a Circadian Rhythm Do Not Make

This post is a relatively recent (May 24, 2006) critique of a PLoS paper....

Fiona turns green and ogre-ish at night

'Fiona' Gene Controls Flower's Physiologic Clock: Scientists have found a new gene that regulates the daily and yearly physiological cycles of flowering and seeding. POSTECH researchers, led by Nam Hong-gil and Kim Jeong-sik, said that they named the gene FIONA1...

New and Exciting in PLoS Computational Biology

I found two articles interesting to me in today's issue of PLoS Computational Biology - the first one about becoming a good scientist, the other on circadian rhythms: On the Process of Becoming a Great Scientist: In the vein of...

Floral Clock

Washington Post has an article on how to plant your own floral clock, just like the one built by Linnaeus....

Middle-East Diplomacy: the battle of wits between an Owl and a Lark

It's rare that an article combines my two interests - in biological clocks and politics. This one does: Circadian rhythms differ for the king and the president: One is a night owl who likes to do business after midnight. The...

Clocks and Migratory Orientation in Monarch Butterflies

I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in...

Shift Work labeled as a Probable Cause of Cancer

Shift Work May Be Cancer Risk: In an announcement to be published Saturday in the journal Lancet Oncology, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, will label shift work as a "probable cause" of...

High-school student models the circadian clock

Plano teen wins regional science award, moves on to national competition: The awards, which recognize exceptional achievement in science, were announced Saturday at the University of Texas at Austin. Alexander, who won a $3,000 scholarship, was honored for developing a...

New and Exciting in PLoS Community Journals

I was fantastically busy this past week, so I failed to alert you to new articles published in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. I have posted my picks from the latter one. This...

Daylight Savings Time worse than previously thought

I am sure I have ranted about the negative effects of DST here and back on Circadiana, but the latest study - The Human Circadian Clock's Seasonal Adjustment Is Disrupted by Daylight Saving Time (pdf) (press releases: ScienceDaily, EurekAlert) by...

ClockQuotes

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce. - Mark Twain...

Oxytocin and Childbirth. Or not.

When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include...

Endocrine rhythms

Circadian clocks: regulators of endocrine and metabolic rhythms by Michael Hastings, John S O'Neill and Elizabeth S Maywood is a new and excellent review of the interaction between the clocks and hormones in mammals, focusing at the molecular level. The...

JETLAG - new circadian gene in Drosophila

From June 26, 2006.......

The Amplitude Problem

If you are one of the few of my readers who actually slogged through my Clock Tutorials, especially the difficult series on Entrainment and Phase Response Curves, you got to appreciate the usefulness of the oscillator theory from physics in...

Everything Important Cycles

Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner....

How Period and Timeless Interact in Fruitflies

A very cool study that I could not help but comment on (January 18, 2006)......

VIP synchronizes mammalian circadian pacemaker neurons

No other aspect of behavioral biology is as well understood at the molecular level as the mechanism that generates and sustains circadian rhythms. If you are following science in general, or this blog in particular, you are probably familiar with...

Is That Your Jet-Lag Treatment Showing or are you just Happy To See Me?

If this gets more widely known (and, with this post, I am trying to help it become so), you can just imagine the jokes about the new challenges to the aviation industry and the renewed popularity of the Mile High...

Clock News

Menaker Awarded Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine: Michael Menaker, professor of biology and an international leader in the field of circadian rhythm research, received the Peter C. Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine from the Harvard Medical School Division of...

A naturally occuring mutation of the core clock gene timeless in European Drosophila affects photoperiodic response

Surprise, surprise - a paper in Science is up there with a free online access (not the PDF, but the Full Text and that is something!): A Molecular Basis for Natural Selection at the timeless Locus in Drosophila melanogaster: Diapause...

Everything Important Cycles

Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner....

Timing of duration of protein activity - a molecular clock or timer?

This article, of course, got my attention: Clocking In And Out Of Gene Expression Using steroid receptor coactivator-3 (SRC-3), they demonstrated that activation requires addition of a phosphate molecule to the protein at one spot and addition of an...

Sleep News

More stuff from SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies: Sleep Deprivation Affects Eye-steering Coordination When Driving: Driving a vehicle requires coordination of horizontal eye movements and steering. Recent research finds that even a single...

Sleep News

Children With Sleep Disorder Symptoms Are More Likely To Have Trouble Academically: Students with symptoms of sleep disorders are more likely to receive bad grades in classes such as math, reading and writing than peers without symptoms of sleep disorders,...

Sleep News

Sleep Deprivation Affects Airport Baggage Screeners' Ability To Detect Rare Targets: A lack of sleep may affect the performance of airport employees, which can, in turn, compromise the safety of airline passengers. Sleep deprivation can impair the ability of airport...

Sleep News

Wide Range Of Sleep-related Disorders Associated With Abnormal Sexual Behaviors, Experiences: A paper published in the June 1st issue of the journal SLEEP is the first literature review and formal classification of a wide range of documented sleep-related disorders associated...

Is That Your Jet-Lag Treatment Showing or are you just Happy To See Me?

If this gets more widely known (and, with this post, I am trying to help it become so), you can just imagine the jokes about the new challenges to the aviation industry and the renewed popularity of the Mile High...

Flirting under Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night, or, The Secret Night-Life of Fruitflies

Review of some very cool new papers on Drosophila circadian clocks

Bacteria do it differently

I recently mentioned a study reporting circadian oscillations of bacterial clock-proteins KaiA, KaiB and KaiC in a dish with no transcription and translation whatsoever - the oscillations being due entirely to polymerization of proteins. Now, a mathematical model of this...

A Pacemaker is a Network

This is going to be a challenging post to write for several reasons. How do I explain that a paper that does not show too much new stuff is actually a seminal paper? How do I condense a 12-page Cell...

Big Circadian Changes at UVA

One chronobiological pioneer is leaving and another one is coming in. Gene Block is going to UCLA and Joe Takahashi is leaving Northwestern (What are Fred Turek and others going to do there without him? What happens to the Howard...

Three labs simultaneously discover a new clock gene!

Thus reports The Scientist: Researchers from three different labs have identified a new circadian gene in the mouse, according to two papers in Science and one paper in Cell published online this week. Mutagenesis screens revealed that mutations in a...

Rotating shifts shorten lives

This is the first study I know that directly tested this - the effects of rotating shifts on longevity - in humans, though some studies of night-shift nurses have shown large increases in breast cancers, stomach ulcers and heart diseases,...

Mouse model for Bipolar Disorder

I made only a brief mention of the study when the press release first came out, but the actual paper (which is excellent) is out now. It is on PLoS so it is free for all to see: Mania-like behavior...

A Circadian Clock that works in a test-tube explained

One of the big questions in circadian research is how does the transcription/translation feedback loop manage to get stretched to such a long time-frame: 24 hours. If one took into account the normal dynamics of transcription and translation, the cycle...

Cortisol necessary for circadian rhythm of cell division

A new paper just came out today on PLoS-Biology: Glucocorticoids Play a Key Role in Circadian Cell Cycle Rhythms. The paper is long and complicated, with many control experiments, etc, so I will just give you a very brief summary...

A potential animal model for Bipolar Disorder

It has been known for quite a while now that bipolar disorder is essentially a circadian clock disorder. However, there was a problem in that there was no known animal model for the bipolar disorder. Apparently that has changed, if...

PERIOD clock gene variants affect sleep need in humans

The most exciting thing about this study is that this is, as far as I am aware, the first instance in which it was shown that a circadian clock gene has any effect on sleep apart from timing of it,...

In Memoriam: Charles Frederick Ehret, 1924-2007

This news just came in: Charles F- Ehret died of natural causes on February 24th at his home in Grayslake, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His Wikipedia entry is quote short: Charles Frederick Ehret is a WWII veteran (Battle of...

Lesson of the Day: Circadian Clocks are HARD to shift!

This is a story about two mindsets - one scientific, one not - both concerned with the same idea but doing something very different with it. Interestingly, both arrived in my e-mail inbox on the same day, but this post...

Small Arctic Mammals Entrain to Something during the Long Summer Day

There are several journals dedicated to biological rhythms or sleep. Of those I regularly check only two or three of the best, so I often miss interesting papers that occur in lower-tier journals. Here is one from December 2006 that...

The Lark-Mouse and the Prometheus-Mouse

Two interesting papers came out last week, both using transgenic mice to ask important questions about circadian organization in mammals. Interestingly, in both cases the gene inserted into the mouse was a human gene, though the method was different and...

Greenwich time to remain Greenwich time

In light of my post earlier today about the discrepanices between 'real time' and 'clock time' (or 'social time'), it is heartening that the Parliament in the U.K. wisely decided not to switch their clocks to the time the rest...

New Model for Interval Timing

While study of Time-Perception is, according to many, a sub-discipline of chronobiology, I personally know very little about it. Time perception is defined as interval timing, i.e., measuring duration of events (as opposed to counting, figuring which one of the...

Sun Time is the Real Time

Time Zones as experimental tools - if you live in a Big City you are just like one of my experimental subjects!

Mammalian SCN

If you are interested in the background and recent history of the research on mammalian SCN in line of Erik Herzog's work I described in VIP synchronizes mammalian circadian pacemaker neurons and A Huge New Circadian Pacemaker Found In...

ClockNews

Memory Experts Show Sleeping Rats May Have Visual Dreams: Matthew A. Wilson, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and postdoctoral associate Daoyun Ji looked at what happens in rats' brains when they...

A Huge New Circadian Pacemaker Found In The Mammalian Brain

If you really read this blog 'for the articles', you know some of my recurrent themes, e.g., that almost every biological function exhibits cycles and that almost every cell in every organism contains a more-or-less functioning clock. Here is a...

New York Times Gets It Right, Just To Screw Up At The End In Blind Adherence To The He Said/She Said Journalism

Now behind the Wall, but plenty of excerpts available in this March 26, 2005 post......

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Affects The Basic Properties Of The Circadian Clock

How does that work? (April 03, 2005)...

VIP synchronizes mammalian circadian pacemaker neurons

No other aspect of behavioral biology is as well understood at the molecular level as the mechanism that generates and sustains circadian rhythms. If you are following science in general, or this blog in particular, you are probably familiar with...

Clock in the primate adrenal

Often a press release inflates the meaning of a research paper. Here is one example of it (from May 23, 2006):...

Eight Hours a Circadian Rhythm Do Not Make

This post is a relatively recent (May 24, 2006) critique of a PLoS paper....

Rotating Shift-Work can kill you

Chronic Jet-Lag Conditions Hasten Death in Aged Mice Researchers at the University of Virginia have found that aged mice undergoing weekly light-cycle shifts - similar to those that humans experience with jet lag or rotating shift work - experienced significantly...

Waking Experience Affects Sleep Need in Drosophila

There is nothing easier than taking a bad paper - or a worse press release - and fisking it with gusto on a blog. If you happen also to know the author and keep him in contempt, the pleasure of...

Entraining the clock by eating schedules

As the paper linked to in the previous post explains, everything is connected - clocks, sleep, hunger, obesity and diabetes. An important part of understanding all these interconnections between clocks and food is to understand the food-entrainable clocks, i.e., how...

Estrogen, Aggression and Photoperiod

Randy Nelson is a wonderful person, an engaging speaker and the author of the best textbook on Behavioral Endocrinology. I heard that he is also a great teacher which does not surprise me and he has a talent for attracting...

Circadian Rhythms, or Not, in Arctic Reindeer

Placing a cool physiological/behavioral study into an evolutionary context

Another Clock Gene

Considering that circadian clocks were first discovered in plants, and studied almost exclusively in plants for almost a century before people started looking at animals in the early 20th century, it is somewhat surprising that the molecular aspects of the...

It's not the quantity, but timing

Study says no video games on school nights: According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits...

Circadian Rhythm of Caffeine Effects

Since every chemical induces a different response in the body dependent on the time of day when it is administered, I am not surprised that this also applies to caffeine: A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded...