Congratulations to Chris Micklem, 2018 cohort PhD student on the BBSRC DTP Programme, for publishing the Review Article ‘Cut the noise or couple up: Coordinating circadian and synthetic clocks’ in Cell Press iScience.

Chris and his Supervisor, James Locke, discuss how circadian clocks across the Tree of Life are coordinated, the experimental and theoretical methods that have facilitated their study, and the parallels that can be drawn with synthetic biological oscillators.

Summary

Circadian clocks are important to much of life on Earth and are of inherent interest to humanity, implicated in fields ranging from agriculture and ecology to developmental biology and medicine. New techniques show that it is not simply the presence of clocks, but coordination between them that is critical for complex physiological processes across the kingdoms of life. Recent years have also seen impressive advances in synthetic biology to the point where parallels can be drawn between synthetic biological and circadian oscillators. This review will emphasize theoretical and experimental studies that have revealed a fascinating dichotomy of coupling and heterogeneity among circadian clocks. We will also consolidate the fields of chronobiology and synthetic biology, discussing key design principles of their respective oscillators.

To read the full publication, please click here