SCIENTISTS have discovered a gene that is responsible for your
sleep patterns. So if you find your sleep cycle disrupted after a jet
lag or a graveyard shift at work, it's because Lhx1, the body's
timekeeper of sorts, is doing its job.
According to the scientists, both of Indian origin, the discovery
of the gene is relevant for modern society where our sleep-wake cycles
are disrupted by the schedules we choose to keep. They say the discovery
can help in finding treatments for sleep problems, enabling
shift-workers or jet-lagged travelers to adjust to time differences.
“We found a gene called Lhx1 that controls how individual clock
neurons talk to each other. Such cross-talk helps consolidate activity
and sleep to the right time of the day and prevents the sleep time from
wandering when the light or dark cycle changes. The study shows that
weakening the cross-talk among clock cells can be an effective method to
change sleep- or activity-time, which is particularly useful for people
who work between day and night shifts, so that they can adjust their
sleep-time easily when their work-shift changes. Nearly 10-15 per cent
of the workforce in most countries are shift-workers. When they change
from night to day shift or when they try to be 'day active' during the
weekend, it is very difficult for them to readjust their sleep time.
Consequently, they get less sleep, have reduced productivity and, in the
long run, are predisposed to many chronic diseases. Finding a treatment
to readjust sleeping time will hugely benefit them," said Dr
Satchidananda Panda, associate professor at the Salk Institute, in an
email interview.
Dr Shubhroz Gill, researcher at Salk Institute and co-first
author of the paper, which has been published in the journal eLife,
further explained that humans have internal biological clocks that
generate 24-hour rhythms for sleep, waking hours and to maintain body
temperature, among other things.
“The internal clock is useful only when it is in sync with the
external clock, that is the day or night cycle. When a person travels
from one time-zone to another, say, from San Diego to Mumbai, as soon as
he or she lands in Mumbai, the internal clock is still running on San
Diego time and is thus not very useful. As a result, it is realigned to
Mumbai time, a process that takes a few days. In the meantime, the
person undergoes the well-known adverse effects...namely, jet lag. We found that Lhx1 was involved in keeping the internal
clock, a region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN)
ticking normally when the person was in San Diego, and played a role in
allowing the internal clock to resynchronise to Mumbai time. Lhx1 plays a
critical role in the rhythm generation ability of the SCN," he said.
The scientists disrupted the light-dark cycles in mice and
compared changes in the expressions of thousands of genes in the SCN
with other mouse tissues. In the end, they identified 213 gene
expression changes that were unique to SCN. They then further narrowed
these down to 13. Of these, only one was suppressed in response to
light, the Lhx1.
The team has been working on this paper for six years and the
research involved multiple methods, including genomics, genetics,
electrophysiology, gene cloning, animal behavior and transgenic animals.
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