Evans Jennifer A, Schwartz William J
Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Health Sciences, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA.
Department of Neurology, Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2024 Jul;210(4):503-511. doi: 10.1007/s00359-023-01659-1. Epub 2023 Jul 23.
Decades have now passed since Colin Pittendrigh first proposed a model of a circadian clock composed of two coupled oscillators, individually responsive to the rising and setting sun, as a flexible solution to the challenge of behavioral and physiological adaptation to the changing seasons. The elegance and predictive power of this postulation has stimulated laboratories around the world in searches to identify and localize such hypothesized evening and morning oscillators, or sets of oscillators, in insects, rodents, and humans, with experimental designs and approaches keeping pace over the years with technological advances in biology and neuroscience. Here, we recount the conceptual origin and highlight the subsequent evolution of this dual oscillator model for the circadian clock in the mammalian suprachiasmatic nucleus; and how, despite our increasingly sophisticated view of this multicellular pacemaker, Pittendrigh's binary conception has remained influential in our clock models and metaphors.
自科林·皮特恩德里希首次提出生物钟模型以来，几十年过去了。该模型认为生物钟由两个相互耦合的振荡器组成，分别对日出和日落做出反应，是应对行为和生理适应季节变化挑战的灵活解决方案。这一假设的精妙之处和预测能力激发了世界各地的实验室，致力于在昆虫、啮齿动物和人类中识别和定位这种假设的夜间和早晨振荡器或振荡器组，多年来实验设计和方法一直紧跟生物学和神经科学的技术进步。在这里，我们讲述了这个生物钟双振荡器模型在哺乳动物视交叉上核中的概念起源，并强调了其后续的演变；以及尽管我们对这个多细胞起搏器的看法日益复杂，但皮特恩德里希的二元概念在我们的时钟模型和隐喻中仍然具有影响力。
