Discovery of ‘alarm-clock’ gene

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDOct 3 2011

According to researchers the human body has a so-called ‘alarm-clock’ gene that wakes a person up.

Researchers led by Indian-American scientist, Satchidananda Panda at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., said the gene is responsible for starting the body’s biological clock from its restful state every morning. They add that this may open avenues in research in insomnia or sleeplessness, aging and chronic illnesses.

“The body is essentially a collection of clocks,” associate professor Satchidananda Panda said. “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.” “It's like an ignition in a car; it turns things on,” said Panda, whose findings are published in the journal Science.

“Now that we've found it, we can explore more deeply how our biological clocks malfunction as we get older and develop chronic illness,” said Panda. “A lot of the genes involved in the biological clock are also involved in diabetes, regulation of the cardiovascular system and even cancer,” Panda explained. “We need to find out more about what's happening at the cellular level to better treat disorders in a number of biological areas.”

Salk researchers and their collaborators described how the gene KDM5A encoded a protein, JARID1a, that served as an activation switch to maintain human circadian rhythm. The central player of the biological clock is a protein called PERIOD (PER). The number of PER proteins in each of our cells rises and falls every 24 hours. Human body cells use the level of PER protein as an indicator of the time of the day and tell the body when to sleep or be awake.