The molecular pathway that carries time-of-day signals from the body's internal clock to ultimately guide daily behavior is like a black box, says Amita Sehgal, PhD, the John Herr Musser Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director, Comprehensive Neuroscience Center, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.

Now, new research from the Sehgal lab is taking a peek inside, describing a molecular pathway and its inner parts that connect the well-known clock neurons to cells governing rhythms of rest and activity in fruit flies. Sehgal is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The other co-author on the study is Wenyu Luo, PhD, a Penn doctoral student who recently defended her dissertation. The findings, which will be featured on the cover of the February 17th issue of Cell, are published online this week.

"Most colleagues would say that we have some understanding of how the clock works and how it is synchronized with light,” says Sehgal. “But we are just beginning to get a glimpse of how the clock drives behavior in the rest of an organism's systems."

Prying the Black Box Open

Normally, flies have a robust rhythm of being active during daylight hours and quiet during the night. Sehgal and Luo essentially found that a microRNA (miRNA) named miR-279 acts through the JAK/STAT pathway to regulate locomotor activity rhythms through a daily cycling of proteins.

An miRNA is a tiny piece of RNA - a little over 20 bases (DNA building blocks) in length -- that binds to matching pieces of messenger RNA, thereby tying it up and decreasing the production of the corresponding protein.

They found that in mutant flies in which miR-279 was either overexpressed or deleted -- causing high levels or low levels of JAK/STAT signaling -- the flies wake and sleep at random intervals. The flies showed no discernible pattern of activity. Therefore, the investigators concluded that a mid-range level of JAK/STAT activity is necessary to maintain the flies' normal pattern.  In fact, they found that STAT activity displays a daily rhythm.

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