Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and.
Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA.
J Clin Invest. 2020 Jan 2;130(1):39-50. doi: 10.1172/JCI130143.
The discovery of peripheral intracellular clocks revealed circadian oscillations of clock genes and their targets in all cell types, including those in the lung, sparking exploration of clocks in lung disease pathophysiology. While the focus has been on the role of these clocks in adult airway diseases, clock biology is also likely to be important in perinatal lung development, where it has received far less attention. Historically, fetal circadian rhythms have been considered irrelevant owing to lack of external light exposure, but more recent insights into peripheral clock biology raise questions of clock emergence, its concordance with tissue-specific structure/function, the interdependence of clock synchrony and functionality in perinatal lung development, and the possibility of lung clocks in priming the fetus for postnatal life. Understanding the perinatal molecular clock may unravel mechanistic targets for chronic airway disease across the lifespan. With current research providing more questions than answers, it is about time to investigate clocks in the developing lung.
外周细胞内时钟的发现揭示了时钟基因及其靶基因在所有细胞类型中的昼夜节律振荡，包括肺部细胞，这激发了人们对肺部疾病病理生理学中时钟的探索。虽然这些时钟在成人气道疾病中的作用一直是研究重点，但时钟生物学在围产期肺发育中也可能很重要，但目前对其关注较少。从历史上看，由于胎儿缺乏外部光照，胎儿的昼夜节律一直被认为是无关紧要的，但最近对周围时钟生物学的深入了解提出了时钟出现的问题，其与组织特异性结构/功能的一致性，围产期肺发育中时钟同步和功能的相互依赖性，以及胎儿肺部时钟为出生后生活做好准备的可能性。了解围产期分子时钟可能会揭示整个生命周期慢性气道疾病的机制靶点。目前的研究提出的问题多于答案，是时候研究发育中肺部的时钟了。
