The circadian clock and glucocorticoids – Interactions across many time scales
Section snippets
The circadian clock
The movements of Earth in the solar system, its yearly path around the sun and daily rotation on its axis, bring about regular changes in the environment for the life inhabiting the planet. Many if not most organisms have developed internal mechanisms that allow them to anticipate these changes. Thus, many birds and mammals possess internal timers to anticipate the changing seasons, allowing them to prepare for yearly migrations and periods of reproduction or hibernation (Gwinner, 2003, Paul et
Glucocorticoid hormones – dynamics on many time scales
Circadian rhythms of hormone release are a prominent aspect of circadian clock output. Circadian changes have been described e.g. for melatonin, growth hormone, thyroid hormone, prolactin, and glucocorticoids (Morris et al., 2012). However, in many cases hormones are also subject to dynamics on additional time scales, such as pulsatile release and seasonal differences. Especially glucocorticoid dynamics have been studied over a large variety of time scales, and the following sections will give
Transcriptional bursts in circadian gene expression
As described above for glucocorticoid signaling, the circadian transcription of clock genes also involves processes occurring on time scales lower than the circadian cycle, with transcription taking place in discrete short bursts (Stratmann et al., 2012, Suter et al., 2011a). Indeed, it has been generally proposed that most genes are transcribed during short activity periods separated by silent phases (reviewed in Suter et al. (2011b)). For the clock genes Bmal1 and Per2 and for the direct
Perspectives
In summary, the glucocorticoid hormone system and the circadian clock appear to interact over many time scales (Fig. 4). While recent work has made great progress notably towards understanding the dynamic molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in both systems and pointed out numerous areas of physiological cross-talk between glucocorticoids and the circadian clock, many open questions remain.
Major future challenges will be to determine the precise molecular mechanisms by which
Acknowledgements
We thank Andrew Cato, Hugues Dardente and Nicolas Diotel for a critical reading of the manuscript.
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