EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Resilient circadian oscillator revealed in individual cyanobacteria

Irina Mihalcescu (), Weihong Hsing and Stanislas Leibler
Additional contact information
Irina Mihalcescu: Université Joseph Fourier – Grenoble I
Weihong Hsing: Princeton University
Stanislas Leibler: The Rockefeller University

Nature, 2004, vol. 430, issue 6995, 81-85

Abstract: Abstract Circadian oscillators, which provide internal daily periodicity, are found in a variety of living organisms, including mammals, insects, plants, fungi and cyanobacteria1. Remarkably, these biochemical oscillators are resilient to external and internal modifications, such as temperature and cell division cycles. They have to be ‘fluctuation (noise) resistant’2 because relative fluctuations in the number of messenger RNA and protein molecules forming the intracellular oscillators are likely to be large. In multicellular organisms, the strong temporal stability of circadian clocks, despite molecular fluctuations, can easily be explained by intercellular interactions3,4,5. Here we study circadian rhythms and their stability in unicellular cyanobacteria Synechoccocus elongatus. Low-light-level microscopy has allowed us to measure gene expression under circadian control in single bacteria, showing that the circadian clock is indeed a property of individual cells. Our measurements show that the oscillators have a strong temporal stability with a correlation time of several months. In contrast to many circadian clocks in multicellular organisms, this stability seems to be ensured by the intracellular biochemical network, because the interactions between oscillators seem to be negligible.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02533 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:430:y:2004:i:6995:d:10.1038_nature02533

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature02533

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:430:y:2004:i:6995:d:10.1038_nature02533