Circadian rhythm and clock genes : winding down the clock in ageing

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In this rotation the student will join a recently established interdisciplinary project that has been investigating how circadian rhythms change with age using mouse models. Circadian rhythms control a wide range of physiological and behavioural processes that decline with age such as activity, sleep, eating and memory. The overall aim of this project is to examine how circadian rhythms alter with age and ultimately whether a biological mechanism can be identified to prolong healthy circadian rhythms into old age. The student will learn how to use computerised monitoring systems to measure home cage activity of mice over several weeks, analyse these activity patterns under different environmental conditions and learn how to analyse their datasets using statistics. The student will use RNA extracted from mouse brain to investigate expression of genes involved in regulation of the circadian cycle for e.g. Per1, Per2, CLOCK, Bmal1 etc. and investigate whether these are associated with any behavioural changes detected. This will provide training in in vivo skills, animal behaviour, statistics, database handling, general molecular laboratory skills including RNA extraction and quantitative PCR.