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Molecular clocks

PERpetuating the PASt

Nature volume 389, pages 443–444 (1997)Cite this article

The rhythmicity of biological processes is governed by intracellular mechanisms — a molecular time-keeping organizer seems to regulate the balance of many periodic physiological events, ranging from plant photosynthesis to hormonal oscillations and annual breeding cycles in mammals. A major property of this endogenous clock, or pacemaker, is its self-sustained rhythmic function. Pacemakers are thought to be made up of a network of transcriptional regulators, which mediate physiological events through the cyclic control of other genes downstream.

Studies in various organisms indicated that the regulatory mechanisms that are responsible for clock function seem to share some limited similarities. So, considering that the day-night rhythm has remained unchanged during the past hundreds of million of years, one question arises: how conserved are the molecular features of the clock during evolution? The cloning of the mammalian orthologue of the Drosophila period (per) gene by Tei and colleagues1, reported on page 512of this issue, represents another step towards answering this question.

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Figure 1: Comparison of the fruitfly and mouse Per proteins, along with the mouse Clock protein.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, BP163, CU de Strasbourg, Illkirch, 67404, France

    Paolo Sassone-Corsi

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  1. Paolo Sassone-Corsi
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Sassone-Corsi, P. PERpetuating the PASt. Nature 389, 443–444 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/38904

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