Speaker
Description
Circadian rhythms play an important role in human health and disease. In mammals, many cells in the central nervous system and periphery have circadian clocks; these cellular clocks are synchronized hierarchically, with the synchronized cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) acting as the master clock. For the pineal gland, an indirect neural projection from the SCN conveys this timing information, resulting in pineal melatonin release into both the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid. The hormone melatonin thus becomes a whole-body messenger of the current state of the clock. Melatonin, in turn, affects the SCN and is involved in phase resetting of the master clock. In this talk, I will present a mathematical model of the molecular synthesis of melatonin and its interactions with a mechanistic model of the circadian clock. The model predicts the primary mechanisms of melatonin’s phase resetting effects; current work uses the model to study observed sex differences in melatonin signaling and their health consequences.
