The Circadian Clock
This comprehensive book, written by experts in the field, provides historical and current information about the circadian clock, molecular properties of clock components and their roles in health and disease. The Circadian Clock includes advances in sever
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Protein Reviews Series Editor: M. Zouhair Atassi Baylor College of Medicine Houston, Texas
For other titles published in this series, go to www.springer.com/series/6876
Urs Albrecht Editor
The Circadian Clock
Editor Urs Albrecht Unit of Biochemistry Department of Medicine University of Fribourg 1700 Fribourg Switzerland [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-1261-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-1262-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1262-6 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932755 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
With the invitation to edit this volume, I wanted to take the opportunity to assemble reviews on different aspects of circadian clocks and rhythms. Although most contributions in this volume focus on mammalian circadian clocks, the historical introduction and comparative clocks section illustrate the importance of various other organisms in deciphering the mechanisms and principles of circadian biology. Circadian rhythms have been studied for centuries, but only recently, a molecular understanding of this process has emerged. This has taken research on circadian clocks from mystic phenomenology to a mechanistic level; chains of molecular events can describe phenomena with remarkable accuracy. Nevertheless, current models of the functioning of circadian clocks are still rudimentary. This is not due to the faultiness of discovered mechanisms, but due to the lack of undiscovered processes involved in contributing to circadian rhythmicity. We know for example, that the general circadian mechanism is not regulated equally in all tissues of mammals. Hence, a lot still needs to be discovered to get a full understanding of circadian rhythms at the systems level. In this respect, technology has advanced at high speed in the last years and provided us with data illustrating the sheer complexity of regulation of physiological processes in organisms. To handle this information, computer aided integration of the results is of utmost importance in order to discover novel concepts that ultimately need to be tested experimentally. In this development of new concepts lies the chance to understand living organisms better and to develop strategies
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