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What Makes Life Tick: Taking Apart the Living Clock

What Makes Life Tick: Taking Apart the Living Clock Feature What Makes Life Tick: Taking Apart the Living Clock MELISSA LEE PHILLIPS n the fourth century BC, the Greek IAndrosthenes recorded the first writ- ten observation of a circadian rhythm— the daily opening and nightly closing of the leaves of a tamarind tree. To An- drosthenes, it must have seemed that the leaves moved in response to light or some other physical cue. For the next two thou- sand years, natural philosophers believed that daily rhythms of plant movement and animal behavior must be reactions to environmental signals. But in 1729, French astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan took a helio- trope plant inside a dark room and watched it continue its daily cycles of leaf movement in the absence of sunlight. While heliotrope plants—and all other Our planet’s daily astronomical cycles have given a selective advantage to organisms circadian organisms—need environ- that are always ready for them. The circadian rhythm of gene expression persists mental input to cycle at exactly 24 hours, without environmental cues, but the clock must be entrained—usually by the they have “free-running” rhythms of close sun—to cycle at exactly 24 hours. Photograph: Melissa Lee Phillips. to that (circadian means “about a day”) without http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png BioScience Oxford University Press

What Makes Life Tick: Taking Apart the Living Clock

Lee Phillips, Melissa
BioScience , Volume 55 (11) – Nov 1, 2005
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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© 2005 American Institute of Biological Sciences
Subject
News & Features
ISSN
0006-3568
eISSN
1525-3244
DOI
10.1641/0006-3568(2005)055[0928:WMLTTA]2.0.CO;2
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Feature What Makes Life Tick: Taking Apart the Living Clock MELISSA LEE PHILLIPS n the fourth century BC, the Greek IAndrosthenes recorded the first writ- ten observation of a circadian rhythm— the daily opening and nightly closing of the leaves of a tamarind tree. To An- drosthenes, it must have seemed that the leaves moved in response to light or some other physical cue. For the next two thou- sand years, natural philosophers believed that daily rhythms of plant movement and animal behavior must be reactions to environmental signals. But in 1729, French astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan took a helio- trope plant inside a dark room and watched it continue its daily cycles of leaf movement in the absence of sunlight. While heliotrope plants—and all other Our planet’s daily astronomical cycles have given a selective advantage to organisms circadian organisms—need environ- that are always ready for them. The circadian rhythm of gene expression persists mental input to cycle at exactly 24 hours, without environmental cues, but the clock must be entrained—usually by the they have “free-running” rhythms of close sun—to cycle at exactly 24 hours. Photograph: Melissa Lee Phillips. to that (circadian means “about a day”) without

Journal

BioScience – Oxford University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2005

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