GENES INFLUENCE YOUR BASIC HABITS - MENTAL ABILITY AND CAPABILITY

Every cell in our body has a clock which is controlled by the brain’s hypothalamus, which, acting on genetic inputs, works as a central clock for the human body, according to a study. Researchers at the University of Zurich’s chronobiology and sleep research group have developed a simple skin test that can show if someone who hates getting up is plain lazy, or whether their body clock is badly out of sync with that of other people.

Scientists in the last decade have found that genes can influence a person’s preference for rising extremely early, or late in the day. The skin test could help develop treatments for sleep ailments, especially insomnia. Once the cause of a sleep disorder has been diagnosed, it is possible to test treatments on patients who all have the same underlying dysfunction, a key step towards developing more effective treatments for body clock disorders.
The study, led by Prof. Steve Brown of University of Zurich, found that the brain’s hypothalamus acts as a central clock for the body, but does so by synchronising all the individual cells, which have their own clocks.Skin cells are much easier clocks to study than the one in the brain and the team obtained cells from 28 volunteers and inserted into them a gene that glowed, creating biological clocks that waxed or waned in brightness over 24 hours.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that skin cells from extreme early-risers had the shortest glowing periods and those from very late-risers had the longest. “People know whether they are larks or owls,” records says. “The interesting part is that they are not all larks or owls for the same reason, and this research addresses the molecular cause of their early or late behaviour.”

“What is really nice here is that by looking at clocks in peripheral tissues, we have for the first time been able to look, by proxy, at the molecular mechanisms in different human individuals that allow them to sense time in the brain. All in all, I find it quite incredible that skin cells can tell us something about a process as complex as human behaviour.”