Sometimes wacky-sounding ideas aren't so crazy after all. If your body clock is all at sea after a long flight or a night shift, the way to reset it may be to scramble your timekeeping neurons even further.
The body's master clock resides in a region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Each neuron in the SCN keeps its own time, but the neurons can synchronise their clocks by sending and receiving signals using a hormone called vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP).
When Erik Herzog at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and colleagues probed the hormone's effects, they discovered that a glut of VIP caused the neurons to lose the ability to synchronise.
Herzog's team wondered whether this might have a beneficial effect. "If the cell rhythms are messed up and out of phase, the system may be more sensitive to environmental cues than it would be if all the cells were in sync," he says, allowing the body clock to adjust more readily.
The VIP treatment
To test the idea, they gave some mice an injection of VIP into the brain before fast-forwarding the light/dark cycle in their cages by 8 hours. The mice that received the hormone adjusted in 4.5 days on average, whereas untreated mice needed nearly eight days – gauging by how active the animals were when the lights were off.
The team is now exploring more convenient ways of boosting VIP levels when needed. "One idea is that bright light might promote the release of VIP in the SCN," says Herzog. Preliminary work has shown that exposing mice to sunshine before disrupting their daily cycles helps them to deal with the change.
If a drug was to be developed, one would hope that manipulating levels of a substance made in the body would not result in nasty side effects, says neuroscientist Steve Brown from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "Time will tell whether this becomes a magic pill for people going on vacation," he says.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1307088110
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
Have your say
Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.
Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
