blog

“I got rhythm,…”, following this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine awarded for insights into organisms’ 24 hour rhythm driven by the circadian clock, we look at the recommended research on internal biological clocks and regulation of daily cycles, such as sleep patterns and feeding behaviour.

Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young are the trio who won this year’s Nobel prize for medicine. They identified a gene, referred to as the ‘period’ gene, within fruit flies that controls the insects’ daily rhythm. This discovery is a crucial piece for understanding life, helping to explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is in synch with environmental changes during the day-night cycle.

We share our top three articles on circadian clocks, and include our usual top three articles for the month and our Hidden Jewels. Click on the images for full access to the recommendations.

F1000Prime is a literature recommendation service. The service has a peer-nominated global Faculty of more than 8,000 of the world’s leading biomedical scientists and clinicians who select those articles they think are particularly interesting and important, and write recommendations explaining their selection. From the numerical ratings awarded, we have created a unique system for quantifying the importance of individual articles.

Top 3 article recommendations about circadian clocks

“Disruption of the circadian clock has previously been linked to cardiovascular disorders including hypertension, although the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. This exceptional research is significant for the way it links disruption of circadian rhythm to salt-sensitive hypertension through dysregulation of the Hsd3b6 gene.” – Eleanor Davies and Scott MacKenzie, Glasgow Cardiovascular Research Centre

“This spectacular paper shows that robust circadian rhythms of protein phosphorylation can be generated in the test tube with three recombinant proteins and ATP.” – Ueli Schibler, University of Geneva, Switzerland

“Don’t you just love it when dogma suddenly has to become less dogmatic? For almost fifteen years the circadian clock of mammals has been modelled as a feedback loop, driven by periodic ‘clock gene’ expression. This paper shows that human red blood cells (RBCs), which lack transcriptional functions, exhibit very nice circadian cycles when held in culture. The startling conclusion is that clock genes are not necessary to make human cells ‘tick’.”- Michael Hastings, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge

Current Top 3 recommendations

Rankings are generated using the articles recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“This excellent opinion piece by Dr. William Kaelin Jr. highlights a problematic trend that has crept into scientific publications, namely the steady increase in the amount of data and number of expected claims required for acceptance of a manuscript in a reputable journal.” – Laura Trinkle-Mulcahy, University of Ottawa, Canada

“Senescent cells are pernicious to health. This effect is related to impaired tissue function, tissue homeostasis, and accelerated aging. In this fascinating study, the authors emphasized the baneful effect of senescent cells and a competitive mechanism of salvation.” – Youngseok Lee, Kookmim University, Korea

“This is a fascinating paper that proposes a new conceptual framework to explain the heritability of traits and diseases. The authors perform novel analyses on existing datasets to examine current assumptions about the contribution of genes and variants to heritability.” – Marc Williams, Geisinger Health System, US

Hidden Jewels

Hidden Jewels rankings only include articles published in specialist journals, recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“This paper remarkably demonstrates that chirality at the cellular level can influence left-right asymmetry at the organism level. Here, Davison et al. examine a mutant pond snail in which the spiral shell turns counter clockwise instead of the wild-type clockwise spiral.” – Ronen Zaidel-Bar, Tel-Aviv University, Israel 

“This work is very important and interesting as it provides an elegant interpretation regarding sex-specific lifespan regulation and the maintenance of balanced sex ratios in animal populations.” – Seung-Jae V Lee and Yujin Lee, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea

“This article should serve to sound the alarm about the truly global threat of antibiotic resistance and argue for the curtailing of antibiotic use as growth promotants in agriculture and the need for discovery and development of novel antibiotics.” – Terry Roemer and Carl Balibar, Merck Research Laboratories, US