TIMETAB · Circadian timing of metabolism in C. elegans
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2014-07-01 → 2016-06-30
- EU contribution
- €223,002
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IEF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Circadian timing of metabolism in C. elegans
Biological clocks, introduce temporal structure into biological processes, synchronizing events between each other and to the external environment. We are interested on the reciprocal relationship between metabolism and biological rhythms, namely circadian and developmental oscillations. To investigate this, we use the nematode C. elegans, a well-established model for metabolic research and emergent for the study of biological timing. We think that research on C. elegans, an amenable genetic model with short life and generation times will add up important information to the field of biological rhythms. Multicellular organisms need to adapt their growth to the environmental conditions, like food availability. This means that the developmental clock has to be slowed or even halted in some cases. For this purpose, organisms rely on cell non-autonomous signalling from nutrient sensing pathways that are conserved across metazoans. The signalling from these pathways has to convey the environmental information and adjust proliferation across the different tissues of the organism. During the implementation of the TiMetab project we have applied a novel technique that we developed (Olmedo et al., 2015. Genetics, 201) to analyse in detail the developmental phenotypes of mutants of the conserved insulin-signalling pathway. We have also measured how the amount of food impacts the speed of the developmental clock. Furthermore, we have studied how starvation induced arrest impacts the later development of the animal. The results derived from this project are advancing our understanding of C. elegans developmental rhythms and especially of its nutritional control. Besides the inherent relevance for developmental biology, this topic is relevant to human health since imbalance of energy homeostasis is involved in diseases like cancer, diabetes and obesity. Contact: martsan@upo.es mariaolmedo@us.es Project website: www.timetabproject.eu
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
We will investigate the role of the circadian clock in energy balance, metabolism and lifespan of C. elegans.The evolution of life on Earth has been dominated by the influence of the daily rhythms imposed by its rotational movement. As a consequence, endogenous circadian clocks are present in organisms from all phyla, helping them to anticipate the daily cycles in their environment. This endogenous clock gets information from external cues (zeitgebers) in order to synchronise internal timing to the 24 h day. Circadian clocks regulate processes from gene expression to behaviour, resulting in rhythms in metabolite levels and food intake. The disruption of circadian rhythms has been linked to many pathological conditions, including sleep disorders, depression, metabolic syndrome and cancer. As obesity becomes epidemic in industrialized societies in parallel with a well-documented disruption of our circadian rhythms, the relationship between them becomes highly relevant. We propose to investigate this problem using the nematode C. elegans, an emergent model for the study of circadian rhythms and already established for metabolic research.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD PABLO DE OLAVIDE · SevillaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union