Oct 3: Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young were awarded the Nobel prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries about the molecular mechanisms controlling the body's circadian rhythm.
The scientists used fruit flies to isolate a gene that controls the rhythm of a living organism's daily life. Dr Hall, Dr Rosbash and Dr Young were "able to peek inside our biological clock", helping "explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so it's synchronised with the earth's revolutions," the Nobel prize panel said.
By examining the internal workings of fruit flies, the investigators helped determine that the gene they were analysing encoded a protein that accumulated in cells at night, and then degraded during the day. Over decades of research, these scientists identified the mechanisms governing the clockwork inside the cell, shedding light on the biology of humans and other multicellular organisms whose biological clocks function on the same principles.
"With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day," committee members noted. "The clock regulates critical functions such as behaviour, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism." The researchers studied fruit flies in which a gene called period seemed to control circadian rhythm; when it was mutated, the insects lost that rhythm.
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