Enjoy a Long Day of Sin By Slowing Circadian Clock

The compound, dubbed 'longdaysin,' "massively slows down the body clock, it turns to 24 hour body clock into a 36 hour one," says Steve Kay, chair of biology at the University of California San Diego and an author on the paper published in this week's edition of the online journal PLoS Biology. _USAToday

Have you ever wished to have more hours in the day? With better modulators of the body's built-in biological clock for daily circadian rhythms, you can! Of course the annoying day-night sun cycle will attempt to disrupt your plans, but if you are serious you can simply move underground away from the sunshine and night sky. Why should you be confined by a 24 hour cycle that is only an evolutionary residue left over from man's early origins? We will be leaving this planet for distant horizons sooner or later. May as well get used to adjusting our body clocks to suit our needs, and stop being chained to a the same cycle that regulated the cave men.

Most organisms show daily rhythms in physiology, behavior, and metabolism, which may be advantageous because they anticipate environmental changes thus optimize energy metabolism. These rhythms are controlled by the circadian clock, which produces cyclic expression of thousands of output genes. More than a dozen components of the circadian clock are called clock genes, and the proteins they encode form a transcription factor network that generates rhythmic gene expression. In this study, we set out to control the function of the circadian clock and to identify new clock proteins by means of chemical tools. We tested the effects on the clock in human cells of around 120,000 uncharacterized compounds. Here we describe identification of a novel compound “longdaysin” that markedly slows the circadian clock both in cultured mammalian cells and in living zebrafish. _PLOS