New components of the circadian oscillator system of Neurospora

生物钟驱动着从单个细胞到整个有机体的所有组织层次的生物体的24小时节律。尽管生物钟对于人类的睡眠/觉醒、植物的季节性开花、迁徙蝴蝶的导航能力以及无数其他过程都很重要，但我们仍然不知道这些生物钟在分子水平上是如何工作的。在真核生物中，一组“时钟蛋白”在24小时的反馈循环中打开和关闭特定的基因。这种“时钟基因反馈回路”多年来一直是关于时钟如何工作的主导思想。然而，当这些反馈回路不起作用时，仍然可以看到一些节奏。我的实验室正试图找出没有已知反馈回路的时钟是如何工作的，我们站在努力揭露旧思想的缺陷并找到新的时钟机制的最前沿。我们用真菌

Circadian clocks drive 24-hour rhythms in living things at all levels of organization, from single cells to whole organisms. In spite of the importance of clocks for daily cycles of sleep/wake in humans, seasonal flowering in plants, navigational ability in migrating butterflies, and countless other processes, we still don’t know exactly how these clocks work at the molecular level. In eukaryotes, a set of “clock proteins” turns on and off specific genes in a 24-hour feedback loop. This “clock gene feedback loop” has been the dominant idea about how clocks work for many years. However, some rhythms can still be seen when these feedback loops are not functioning. My lab is trying to find out how clocks without the known feedback loops work, and we are in the forefront of the effort to expose the deficiencies in the old idea and find new clock mechanisms. We use the fungus