Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
Tokyo, July 24. - When temperatures rise, our internal biological clock is forced to change rhythm to stay synchronized with its 24-hour cycle: the activity of the genes involved actually changes with regularly repeating accelerations and decelerations.
This was discovered, thanks to physics, in a study published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, led by the Japan Riken Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iThems).
This process not only helps maintain the clock's stability but also influences how it synchronizes with day and night, becoming less sensitive to external environmental stimuli.
Our biological clock is based on mRNA molecules, the type of RNA that translates the instructions contained in DNA to enable the production of the corresponding proteins.
These mRNAs derive from the rhythmic activation and deactivation of certain genes, but the problem is that most chemical reactions that occur in the body accelerate with rising temperatures.
For this reason, it has until now been a mystery how the body compensates for these changes throughout the year or day, for example, when alternating between the heat outside and the coolness of air-conditioned interiors.
Researchers led by General Kurosawa have found the answer to the mystery: they discovered that the key lies in the rhythm: when it is warmer, mRNA levels increase more rapidly and decrease more slowly, keeping the overall cycle length constant.
This altered rhythm results in a wave that is no longer symmetrical and becomes distorted.
Furthermore, when the wave is distorted, the clock becomes more stable, and external stimuli, such as light and darkness, have less effect on it.
"In the future," Kurosawa says, "the degree of waveform distortion in biological clock genes could become a biomarker that helps us better understand sleep disorders, jet lag, and the effects of aging." (Source: ANSA)
