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Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The ability to perform time-dependent functions has been linked to survival in animals. For a prey, to forage when many predators are active, can be deadly. Performing the right task at the right time is dependent on the animal’s ability to track daily time. Perception of time in the...

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Autores principales: De, Joydeep, Chatterjee, Abhishek
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8780729/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35055846
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/insects13010003
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author De, Joydeep
Chatterjee, Abhishek
author_facet De, Joydeep
Chatterjee, Abhishek
author_sort De, Joydeep
collection PubMed
description SIMPLE SUMMARY: The ability to perform time-dependent functions has been linked to survival in animals. For a prey, to forage when many predators are active, can be deadly. Performing the right task at the right time is dependent on the animal’s ability to track daily time. Perception of time in the animal kingdom dates long back on the evolutionary time-scale. From the unicellular prokaryotes to humans; we all tune our physiology and behaviours according to the time of the day. To do this in the face of unreliable environmental parameters, we use an internal timekeeper. The state of the timekeeper is readjusted daily, by feeding weighted updates about the external factors that oscillate in nature, e.g., light and temperature. In this review, using the example of the fruit flies, we discuss how animals perceive the external and internal times and connect them in the brain. ABSTRACT: We create mental maps of the space that surrounds us; our brains also compute time—in particular, the time of day. Visual, thermal, social, and other cues tune the clock-like timekeeper. Consequently, the internal clock synchronizes with the external day-night cycles. In fact, daylength itself varies, causing the change of seasons and forcing our brain clock to accommodate layers of plasticity. However, the core of the clock, i.e., its molecular underpinnings, are highly resistant to perturbations, while the way animals adapt to the daily and annual time shows tremendous biological diversity. How can this be achieved? In this review, we will focus on 75 pairs of clock neurons in the Drosophila brain to understand how a small neural network perceives and responds to the time of the day, and the time of the year.
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spelling pubmed-87807292022-01-22 Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies De, Joydeep Chatterjee, Abhishek Insects Review SIMPLE SUMMARY: The ability to perform time-dependent functions has been linked to survival in animals. For a prey, to forage when many predators are active, can be deadly. Performing the right task at the right time is dependent on the animal’s ability to track daily time. Perception of time in the animal kingdom dates long back on the evolutionary time-scale. From the unicellular prokaryotes to humans; we all tune our physiology and behaviours according to the time of the day. To do this in the face of unreliable environmental parameters, we use an internal timekeeper. The state of the timekeeper is readjusted daily, by feeding weighted updates about the external factors that oscillate in nature, e.g., light and temperature. In this review, using the example of the fruit flies, we discuss how animals perceive the external and internal times and connect them in the brain. ABSTRACT: We create mental maps of the space that surrounds us; our brains also compute time—in particular, the time of day. Visual, thermal, social, and other cues tune the clock-like timekeeper. Consequently, the internal clock synchronizes with the external day-night cycles. In fact, daylength itself varies, causing the change of seasons and forcing our brain clock to accommodate layers of plasticity. However, the core of the clock, i.e., its molecular underpinnings, are highly resistant to perturbations, while the way animals adapt to the daily and annual time shows tremendous biological diversity. How can this be achieved? In this review, we will focus on 75 pairs of clock neurons in the Drosophila brain to understand how a small neural network perceives and responds to the time of the day, and the time of the year. MDPI 2021-12-21 /pmc/articles/PMC8780729/ /pubmed/35055846 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/insects13010003 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
De, Joydeep
Chatterjee, Abhishek
Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies
title Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies
title_full Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies
title_fullStr Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies
title_full_unstemmed Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies
title_short Perception of Daily Time: Insights from the Fruit Flies
title_sort perception of daily time: insights from the fruit flies
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8780729/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35055846
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/insects13010003
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