Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

My research is aimed at answering this question: How do living things tell time? All living things bigger than bacteria, and even some bacteria, have internal clocks that drive daily rhythms in many biological processes. Environmental cycles of light and dark, and high and low temperature, can reset the internal clock and keep it in step with the external day/night cycle. These "circadian" rhythms (circa diem = about a day) are important in human health: humans have circadian rhythms in activity, sleeping and waking, hormones, body temperature, etc. The internal clocks that drive these rhythms are found in individual cells of all higher organisms and in nearly every cell in the human body. When we suffer from jet lag, or work night shifts, we experience the negative effects of getting our cellular clocks out-of-synch with each other and with the environment. Because the internal clock can be found in individual cells, we can use simple organisms to study it. We are using the fungus Neurospora crassa, a common bread mould, as a model organism to study the mechanism of the clock at the molecular and biochemical level. This fungus is easy to grow in the laboratory, and has been studied for more than 60 years, so we know a great deal about its biochemistry and genetics. We use mutant strains that have disrupted clocks, and we are studying the biochemistry of these mutant strains to try to determine why their clocks are disrupted. For our experiments, we need to carefully control the environment to either avoid any changes in light or temperature that might reset the clock, or to deliberately reset the clock with light cycles or temperature cycles. To do this, we need environmental chambers that will allow us to control the temperature within a few degrees, and that will allow us to program temperature and light cycles in unusual daylengths other than 24 hours. This research may help us identify new components of the clockworks, and this can help us understand how the fungus, and possibly other organisms, use their biochemistry to tell time.