‘Alarm’ Gene Identified

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified a gene that could be described as the human alarm. It starts the biological clock from its restful state every morning.
Discovery of this new gene and the mechanism by which it starts the clock everyday may help explain the genetic underpinnings of sleeplessness, aging and chronic illnesses, such as cancer and diabetes, and could eventually lead to new therapies for these illnesses.
“The body is essentially a collection of clocks,” says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory, who led the research along with Luciano DiTacchio, a post-doctoral research associate. “We roughly knew what mechanism told the clock to wind down at night, but we didn’t know what activated us again in the morning. Now that we’ve found it, we can explore more deeply how our biological clocks malfunction as we get older and develop chronic illness.”
In a report published today in the journal Science, the Salk researchers and their collaborators at McGill University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine describe how the gene KDM5A encodes a protein, JARID1a, that serves as an activation switch in the biochemical circuit that maintains our circadian rhythm.
The discovery fills in a missing link in the molecular mechanisms that control our daily wake-sleep cycle. The central player of our biological clock is a protein called PERIOD (PER). The number of PER proteins in each of our cells rises and falls every 24 hours. Our cells use the level of PER protein as an indicator of the time of the day and tell our body when to sleep or be awake.