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Can your liver feel when you stare at a TV screen or mobile phone late at night? Apparently, and when such activity is detected, the organ can upset your circadian rhythms, making you more vulnerable to health problems.
This is one of the conclusions of two new studies by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, working in collaboration with the Institute for Biomedicine Research in Barcelona, Spain.
The studies, published today in the journal Cell, used specially raised mice to badyze the network of internal clocks that regulate metabolism. Although the researchers suspected that different circadian clocks of the body could function independently of the central clock in the brain's hypothalamus, there was previously no way to test this theory, said Paolo Sbadone -Corsi, director of the Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism of the UCI. author of one of the studies.
To overcome this obstacle, scientists have discovered how to disable the entire circadian system of mice, then start individual clocks. For the experiments reported in the Cell papers, they activated clocks in the liver or the skin.
"The results were quite surprising," said Sbadone-Corsi, professor of biological chemistry at the Donald Bren Chair. "Nobody realized that light could directly affect the liver or the skin."
For example, despite stopping all other body clocks, including the central clock, the liver knew what time it was, reacted to changes in light as the day went on at night and maintained essential functions, such as prepare to digest food at mealtime and convert. glucose in energy.
In one way or another, the circadian liver clock was able to detect light, presumably through signals from other organs. This is only when the mice have been subjected to constant darkness as the liver clock has stopped working.
In future studies, UCI and Barcelona researchers will incorporate other internal clocks to see how different bodies communicate with each other, said Sbadone-Corsi.
"The future consequences of our discoveries are vast," he noted. "With these mice, we can now begin to decipher the metabolic pathways that control our circadian rhythms, our aging processes, and our overall well-being."
In previous studies, Sbadone-Corsi examined how factors such as sleep deprivation, diet, and exercise can reconfigure circadian clocks. Exposure to light from a computer, a TV or a mobile phone just before bedtime can also scramble the internal clocks.
Because of modern lifestyles, it's easy for circadian systems to get lost, he said. In turn, this can lead to depression, allergies, premature aging, cancer and other health problems. Other experiments on mice could reveal ways to make human clocks "less misaligned," added Sbadone-Corsi.
Kevin B. Koronowski, Jacob G. Smith, Muntaha Samad, Siwei Chen, Christophe N. Magnan and Pierre Baldi also participated in this work. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the State Research Agency for Advanced Defense Projects, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, European Research Council and the Government of Catalonia, among other sources of funding.
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