Circadian clockwork: two loops are better than one.
The spectacularly successful race over the past three years to place our understanding of the circadian clockwork of mammals into a molecular framework is beginning to yield the cardinal example of the molecular-genetic control of behaviour. This perspective describes recent evidence for the conservation of a double-loop, autoregulatory feedback mechanism across the best understood eukaryotic circadian systems, and discusses how these findings may illuminate some long-standing puzzles concerning our subliminal sense of circadian time.
Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DY, UK. mh105@cus.cam.ac.uk
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Hastings
D000818:Animals; D002940:Circadian Rhythm / Q000502:physiology*; D005246:Feedback; D008954:Models, Biological; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000502:physiology