Phosphorylation in the cyanobacterial circadian clock

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Circadian rhythms have been observed in many organisms at a variety of physiological processes. Cyanobacteria are the simplest organisms to exhibit circadian rhythms, and provide a well-established molecular genetic and physiological model system. In the current study, we revealed that a master clock element protein, KaiC, exhibits autokinase/autophosphatase activities, which are dramatically modified by associating clock proteins, KaiA and KaiB. Relationship among circadian dynamics of protein-protein interactions among clock proteins, phosphorylation of KaiC and their cellular localization will be a basis for further functional analyses on the mechanism to generate circadian rhythms in the prokaryote.