All living things on our planet – humans, animals and plants have an internal clock that tells you to sleep when it’s time and when you actively. But how this internal clock is controlled?
Two years ago, three Americans were awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for their research on the Bio-rhythm. Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young had found out, what is the role of a Gene and a protein for our body’s internal clock, and for phenomena like jet lag to play.
Already in the 18th century. Century, scientists had discovered that plants have a circadian rhythm, causing them to close their leaves at dusk and open them again the next Morning. Even plants, which were in complete darkness, maintained a 12-hour rhythm. At the time, nobody could explain the reason.
How to know a Plant, that it is day?
In the 1970s, scientists in the US biophysicist Seymour Benzer found that a Gene is co-responsible flying for the Bio-rhythm of fruit. In the 1980s, this year’s Nobel prize winner, isolated this gene.
Hall and Rosbash, working together at Brandeis University, joined to a Protein, the accumulation of the cells during the night and which is degraded during the day. “The Protein inhibits its own production,” said Till Roenneberg, a Chronobiology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, after the awarding of the prizes in the DW-interview. “You have shown that genes that control our internal clock.”
The ultimate Protein
This mechanism applies not only to fruit flies, but also for people and plants. You “know” that it must be night, when much of the Protein, and day, when the cells have degraded most of it. This natural cycle to fit with our Bio-rhythm to the rotation of the earth.
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The Inner clock is ticking
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The Inner clock is ticking
In the relatively small and young research field of chronobiology scientist with a recurring set of phenomena apart in living organisms. The discovery of the Nobel prize winner in the eighties, missed to research a push forward.
How does the biological clock?
Our Inner clock at night, drop blood pressure and the breathing shallow. At the same time, it gives the starting shot for the nightly repair and recovery programs. The absolute low point of our performance curve between 3 and 4 o’clock in the night. Against Tomorrow, the body turns slowly back to activity. From 10 to 12 o’clock in the morning and at 17 o’clock in the afternoon, most of the people are the most productive. Against 14 clock, however, quite a lot of matte feel. The sun ensures that our internal time is clocked a knife from the outside. The sun gives light to the clock, the calibration pulses from the outside.
Listen to Your internal clock, so our organic ticking rhythm
“Today, we know that the internal clock is a highly complex System,” says Roenneberg. “There is not only a clock in the brain, but a clock in each cell of our body.”
An example of our internal clock can be observed at the liver. During the day you can build glycogen from glucose, and in the evening, you build it again, in order to supply the body with glucose. “If the Assembly and dismantling take place at the same time, it is meaningless,” says Henrik Easter, from the Institute for neurobiology at the University of Lübeck, “there must be a temporal separation.”
Damage To Health
If the internal clock is in sync, we feel weak and uncomfortable. If you are not in harmony any longer with the “external clock”, so the actual time of day, we can even be sick.
The internal clock is “not necessary for survival, but it is important to coordinate metabolism and the circadian rhythm,” explains Henrik Easter.
After a flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, our inner clock. Leaden fatigue and exhaustion are the result. In the process of normalization within a short period of time.
In the case of shift workers, the situation is different. The ongoing dissonance between the inner and outer clock has negative consequences, such as, for example, a higher risk of developing mental illness, Diabetes or cancer.
Anyone who lives contrary to his Bio-rhythm, damage in the longer term, his health
Late risers and early risers?
If we are late risers or early birds, is so anchored in our genes. Who lives against his Inner clock and, for example, its personal waking and sleeping-ignored need for rhythm or his Sleep, will be punished by nature sooner or later: nervousness, sleep disorders, stomach problems, or depression or heart disease.
“The internal clock has an eye on everything that goes on in the body,” says Roenneberg. You, however, is different for everyone. Of night owls and larks to sing a song. Researchers studied skin cells from people early and get up later. They found that the internal clock for the early risers is a bit faster.