How does the biological clock work? Does it also have gears and pointers?

Science Fiction Network, April 7th. We all have a biological clock, when to eat, sleep, get up, etc. In fact, many organisms have it. Now, people are studying biological clocks and their responses to the environment in an unprecedented way. Scientists track biological clocks and their functions in real time. They use a tiny aquatic organism called cyanobacteria, whose biological clock works in a similar way to ours.

The team observed the cyanobacteria's core oscillator - a nanomachine driven by three proteins that acts as a time regulator - to study the way its output acts as a timing signal. The core "oscillates" in response to the binding of different signaling molecules throughout the day, causing hundreds of genes in the cyanobacterium to oscillate rhythmically.

The new study analyzed how these interactions change when the cyanobacteria's clock is reset at the molecular level.

"We used in vitro clock responses and performed massively parallel experiments to study the synchronization of the clock with the environment in the presence of the output components," the researchers said.

The research builds on previous work by some members of the team to develop an in vitro clock that can be run in a test tube. Through new advances in the way the clock is monitored and run, the team was able to get real-time readings as it adjusted and responded to timing settings.

This revealed several new insights, including that kinases that mediate gene expression are more closely linked to clock function than previously thought.

"For the first 20 years after its discovery, most studies focused on the core oscillator," said the UC San Diego biochemist. "We found that kinases, which were previously thought to be just output components, are actually part of the overall clock."

The core oscillator is often thought of as the "gear" of the biological clock, and the kinase is the "hand," which combines to show the correct time. If you don't have two hands, they can't set the time correctly, because one hand is a stabilizer and the other is a disruptor of the reset signal. In other words, while taking information from the clock, the kinase also interferes with it.

Now that this real-time monitoring method has been established, it can be used to better understand how our body clocks work and how their timing affects the rest of our bodies.