Café Scientifique Manchester

We are made aware of our circadian clock (or body clock) when we travel by airplane to another time zone; the brain thinks it’s back in Manchester and should be going to sleep but the body is somewhere else and is busy walking about. The jet lag we feel is because the circadian clock turns certain genes on and off in anticipation of day-night activities such as eating, walking, running, and sleeping.  The clock in the brain is the master clock, and it is ‘reset’ in the morning when we see the rising sun.  The brain clock then sends messages to the body to get ready to wake up.  Prof Karl Kadler’s group at the University of Manchester has shown that there is a clock in tendons, which join muscles to bone.  His research is showing that the ‘tendon clock’ maintains the health of tendons.  However, as we age, the tendon clock is less effective and the communication between the brain clock and the tendon clock is ‘out of sync’.  Do older people have permanent tendon jet lag?  Does this explain why older people have aches and pains in their joints and tendons, and why they ‘stiffen up’ at certain times of the day?  People over 40 years old are prone to tendon ruptures; is this because the tendon clock is running slow? In this session, we will look at the evidence and discuss how knowledge of body clocks might help us learn more about our bodies and improve our quality of life. 

Picture shows the changes in gene expression in young tendon every 4 hours during 2 days. Green is when a gene is ‘on’ and red is when it is ‘off’.