[ad_1]
Whether you are an early bird, a night owl or a very talented person in terms of midi functions, you have to deal with slight variations in your body's internal clock. But if you do not know what time it is inside your body, there might be a blood test someday that could tell you that.
This could be important because a "misalignment" between your body's clock and the real time can be dangerous. (An example of such misalignment would be if the most accurate atomic clock says that it is 8 pm, while the cells inside the body of a person have says, no, it's 18 hours)
The test could also help doctors administer drug doses at specific times, the researchers said, although more research is needed before the test can be used clinically.
The new blood test, called TimeSignature, uses a machine learning algorithm designed to look for patterns of gene expression at different times of the day. The researchers recently filed a patent for the blood test and published the results of their study today (Sept. 10) in the journal PNAS.
The team examined 20,000 genes in the body and found that there were about 40 that showed robust gene signals connected at different times. In other words, these 40 genes were more likely to turn on at certain times of the day, depending on the internal clock of a person. [Genetics by the Numbers: 10 Tantalizing Tales]
For example, if a person's body thinks it's 6 o'clock in the morning, it will express more A gene than the B gene; while if she thinks it's 8 o'clock in the morning, maybe she'll be expressing more C gene and a few genes A and B. The TimeSignature test learns these patterns and can generate an estimate of the time at which the body thinks it is.
The researchers tested the TimeSignature algorithm on genetic data from three separate blood-based studies and also tested the test on blood samples taken from 11 patients. They found that they could predict when blood was collected, usually within 2 hours. They also reported that once their test formed on the expected gene levels, it can be applied universally to the data of various patients.
According to the study, the patient must have at least two blood samples spaced enough apart for the test to be accurate. In contrast, previous tests, which aimed to determine the time of the required internal clock, draw blood every hour over several hours, the researchers said.
Such a test could help doctors to deliver medications tailored to each patient.
"Many medications have optimal times for dosing," said in a statement Dr. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine in neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and a neurologist at Northwestern Medicine. "The best time to take the drug for high blood pressure or chemotherapy or radiation therapy may be different from anyone else's."
In addition, almost every cell in the body can read the hour – and many dictate the processes in the body depending on the time (for example, at bedtime, cells can release melatonin, a sleep hormone ).
According to the release, circadian rhythm disturbances have been associated with various diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and asthma, and the test could improve the diagnosis of these disorders and predict who might fall ill.
"We know that if your internal clock is disrupted, it can predispose you to a whole host of diseases," said study co-author Ravi Allada, a professor of neurobiology at Northwestern. "Virtually all tissues and organs are governed by the circadian rhythm."
"The timing is everything," said Allada.
Originally published on Science live.
[ad_2]
Source link
