40 details of the biological clock
Biological time can be determined by a blood test
Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life"
We constantly hear about how important it is to live in harmony with the internal clock. If you suddenly sit down to eat when, according to biological rhythms, the time is not lunch at all, you risk spoiling your metabolism; and if such an untimely meal happens regularly, then your chances of getting overweight and diabetes greatly increase. But if we want to coordinate our habits, schedules, etc. with our own biological clock? Then you need to understand what time they show. And this is not very easy, because understandable external symptoms, like daytime sleepiness, actually indicate only that you have fallen out of the circadian rhythm.
In addition, it is known that many diseases behave differently at different times of the day - for example, in the male body, the consequences of a heart attack will be more serious if the attack occurred during sleep; also, medications and medical procedures act differently depending on what "inner hour" they occurred (in particular, a year ago we wrote that some heart surgeries are better done in the middle of the day). So it would be very good if we had a way to accurately, quickly and simply determine our biological time.
It is known that many genes obey the biological clock. The activity of a gene can be determined by the level of matrix RNA that is copied from it – as we know, RNA molecules serve as an intermediary, a carrier of genetic information from DNA to molecular machines that synthesize proteins. Researchers from Northwestern University have selected forty out of thousands and thousands of human genes that are most convenient to use for assessing biological rhythms - that is, they leave quite noticeable traces in the blood in the form of RNA, and their activity is strongly subordinated to circadian rhythms.
The method was tested on eleven volunteers, and it turned out that it allows you to guess the internal time with an accuracy of two hours. Of course, there have been attempts to estimate and determine the time of the circadian rhythm by blood before, but in other methods it was necessary to take a lot of samples for this.
In the new method, as stated in an article in PNAS (Braun et al., Universal method for robust detection of circadian state from gene expression), only two blood samples per day are enough. The authors of the work claim that their analysis allows taking into account individual characteristics in the activity of genes, and therefore it can be used with any person.
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