Generic temperature compensation of biological clocks by autonomous regulation of catalyst concentration.

ABSTRACT: Circadian clocks--ubiquitous in life forms ranging from bacteria to multicellular organisms--often exhibit intrinsic temperature compensation; the period of circadian oscillators is maintained constant over a range of physiological temperatures, despite the expected Arrhenius form for the reaction coefficient. Observations have shown that the amplitude of the oscillation depends on the temperature but the period does not; this suggests that although not every reaction step is temperature independent, the total system comprising several reactions still exhibits compensation. Here we present a general mechanism for such temperature compensation. Consider a system with multiple activation energy barriers for reactions, with a common enzyme shared across several reaction steps. The steps with

SUBMITTER: Hatakeyama TS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3361444 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature