Biological clocks and sleep

Every cell in the body has its own molecular clock, allowing it to coordinate its daily activities, just as we use a watch to organise our daily lives. A critical aspect of our physiology that is clock-controlled is sleep, but we currently know little about how the clock and sleep are linked. Our work will broadly investigate both clocks and sleep and find out how these processes are integrated and controlled at the molecular level. Understanding about the clock and sleep is important because we now live in a "24/7 culture”, with transatlantic air travel and shift-work being part of normal life for an estimated 25% of Europeans. These types of desynchronisations disrupt our daily physiology and are linked to diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cancer. Daily rhythms are also impaired in the elderly, and in patients with common neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer-type dementia, meaning that clock disruption and sleep disturbance are widespread. Our recent work has given us new insights about how the clock works, and highlights the previously unappreciated role of redox (chemical) oscillations as key drivers in cellular timing, and this will be a key area of investigation. Because this project focuses on the basic mechanisms that make the clock tick, and the molecular processes that control sleep, we anticipate that we will gain insights into normal physiology and therefore disease. In the future, these insights could help to design new medications.