STIG NYGAARD, FLICKRA University of Pennsylvania-based team has documented when genes are expressed across 12 organs in mice throughout the day. The results were published today (October 27) in PNAS. Among other things, the researchers show that 43 percent of genes follow a daily schedule in at least one of the organs profiled, and that more than half of the 100 best-selling drugs in the U.S. target products of genes whose expression cycles.
“This is a much-needed paper in the field showing . . . that a large number of gene transcripts actually oscillate in at least one organ in mouse,” said Satchin Panda, who studies circadian biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and was not involved in the study.
“People suspected that there were a lot more genes than had previously been looked at because we had looked at relatively few organs before,” said study coauthor John Hogenesch, a circadian biologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “But I don’t think we expected that nearly half of the genome would be under clock control.”
Previous studies have chronicled how the body’s circadian clock influences gene expression in several ...
