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What is the time?


Scientists have devised a way to check how synced or out of sync, your circadian clock is; and that too from your blood samples. Yes, you heard right. For those who don’t know what circadian clock is, it is basically the clock of your body which is basically lined up with your wristwatch and pretty much decides when your body does something. Like a normal clock with alarms, your circadian clock tells the body when to feel sleepy or hungry or you need to go to the bathroom. Even the very basic cellular processes are controlled by the circadian clock. When you travel to places with different time zones, it actually disturbs the synchronization of the clock hence causing, what’s known as a jet lag. But what are the practical implications of this technique? Three scientists, Jeffery C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young jointly worked on fruit flies to isolate genes that are in charge of controlling the biological rhythm. For their discovery, they got Nobel prize in Physiology in 2017. Those handfuls of genes actually control the hormone levels, metabolic activities, body temperature etc. and an imbalance in the clock is linked to various disorders like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, insomnia, hypertension, and Parkinson’s disease. A total of about 43% of all genes work on this rhythm and hence knowing the time of your body clock may help doctors and scientists treat some of those disorders. This is where computational biologist Rosemary Braun stepped in. She wrote in The Conversation, that every cell in our body and every other organisms' keeps its time, thanks to a few clock genes and her idea was to use machine learning for this task. Braun, along with two sleep medicine and circadian biology experts, Phyllis Zee and Ravi Allada, first fed the algorithm with enormous amounts of experimental data which helped to train the algorithm. Their algorithm went through all the data and arrived at a conclusion of 41 genes which predicted the time of the day. In other words, the machine learned, which gene did what, at various times of the day. Now, when an original sample set was provided, the results were unprecedented. The algorithm did tell the time of the body clock, with an extreme accuracy. TimeSignature as they call it can predict a person’s internal time within 90 minutes. This will help the doctors, prescribing you medicines, to judge optimal doses and timings of the dosage.
But we will have wait, for this technology to come to doctor's desks. Until then sleep well and keep your clock synced.

Image source: Cleveland Clinic

Regards,
Agradeep Mukherjee
Biotech 3rd

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