Department of Bioengineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0412, USA.
San Diego Center for Systems Biology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0412, USA.
Science. 2011 Sep 2;333(6047):1315-1319. doi: 10.1126/science.1205369.
Biological clocks are self-sustained oscillators that adjust their phase to the daily environmental cycles in a process known as entrainment. Molecular dissection and mathematical modeling of biological oscillators have progressed quite far, but quantitative insights on the entrainment of clocks are relatively sparse. We simultaneously tracked the phases of hundreds of synthetic genetic oscillators relative to a common external stimulus to map the entrainment regions predicted by a detailed model of the clock. Synthetic oscillators were frequency-locked in wide intervals of the external period and showed higher-order resonance. Computational simulations indicated that natural oscillators may contain a positive-feedback loop to robustly adapt to environmental cycles.
生物钟是自我维持的振荡器,通过一个被称为“同步”的过程,使其相位适应每日的环境周期。生物钟的分子剖析和数学建模已经取得了相当大的进展,但对时钟同步的定量理解相对较少。我们同时跟踪了数百个合成遗传振荡器相对于共同外部刺激的相位,以绘制时钟详细模型预测的同步区域图。合成振荡器在外部周期的宽间隔内被锁定在频率上,并表现出高阶共振。计算模拟表明,天然振荡器可能包含正反馈回路,以稳健地适应环境周期。