Our bodies operate on biological clocks that regulate almost everything inside them. Using a $14 million federal grant, Duke University researchers will study those rhythms in an attempt to better understand the internal clock. The grant comes from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , and could help the Department of Defense to better adjust soldiers’ biological clocks when they travel, to speed recovery from jetlag or slow down their metabolism after an injury, according to lead researcher John Harer, a Duke mathematician.
DARPA funded the project under its Biochronicity program, which aims to support research to identify common spatio-temporal instructions, or "clock signatures," in the genome, epigenome, proteome, and transcriptome in prokaryotes and eukaryotes that can be used in a range of applications in humans. The four-year Duke research project will have a heavy dose of mathematics, systems biology, and bioinformatics. DARPA has set several specific milestones that the researchers are to meet at different phases of the research, and the projects will be reviewed annually.
The researchers will seek to identify genes that turn different types of biological clocks on and off. They will further investigate the role each gene plays in these clocks and whether they can be used to indicate where the clock is in its cycle.
"Biological systems have amazing timing capabilities," says Duke mathematician John Harer, the lead investigator on the new grant. The body and its individual cells form an intricate machine, with complex timing mechanisms, which often work flawlessly and usually repair themselves when they don't, he says.
Harer and his collaborators want to unwind the variety of biological clocks found in cells, looking closely at their pieces to see how they work individually and how they work together. Scientists have studied how day and night affects animals' and plants' circadian rhythms, how cells divide, live and die and how they control their own metabolism and growth, Harer says.
If scientists can isolate the genes, molecules and signals of these different biological clocks, they could find ways to control and repair them if they are broken or damaged, Harer says. They could then use that information to better understand and control specific groups of cells, organisms and possibly even systems within our bodies. Harer says scientists may also be better able to explain a variety of other observations, such as the connection between sleep problems and cancer.
One specific DARPA application would be to adjust soldiers' biological clocks when they travel, to speed recovery from jetlag or slow down their metabolism after an injury. There's also interest in the signals that genes and cells send to each other, despite a lot of noise from their surroundings. If scientists can figure out how timing signals are sent, that could be useful for improving the way we send, receive and decipher our own communication signals, Harer says.
Such knowledge could be used to better understand and manage disease, trauma, human combat performance, and to develop countermeasures against infectious diseases. Control of metabolic clocks could be used to expand the "golden window" of opportunity for treating trauma cases coming in from battlefields, or to slow down metabolism after an injury, and to help soldiers adjust to jetlag.
Sources:
e ScienceNews
bizjournal
GenomeWeb
Harer and his collaborators want to unwind the variety of biological clocks found in cells, looking closely at their pieces to see how they work individually and how they work together. Scientists have studied how day and night affects animals' and plants' circadian rhythms, how cells divide, live and die and how they control their own metabolism and growth, Harer says.
If scientists can isolate the genes, molecules and signals of these different biological clocks, they could find ways to control and repair them if they are broken or damaged, Harer says. They could then use that information to better understand and control specific groups of cells, organisms and possibly even systems within our bodies. Harer says scientists may also be better able to explain a variety of other observations, such as the connection between sleep problems and cancer.
One specific DARPA application would be to adjust soldiers' biological clocks when they travel, to speed recovery from jetlag or slow down their metabolism after an injury. There's also interest in the signals that genes and cells send to each other, despite a lot of noise from their surroundings. If scientists can figure out how timing signals are sent, that could be useful for improving the way we send, receive and decipher our own communication signals, Harer says.
Such knowledge could be used to better understand and manage disease, trauma, human combat performance, and to develop countermeasures against infectious diseases. Control of metabolic clocks could be used to expand the "golden window" of opportunity for treating trauma cases coming in from battlefields, or to slow down metabolism after an injury, and to help soldiers adjust to jetlag.
Sources:
e ScienceNews
bizjournal
GenomeWeb
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