Roy Lab

Circadian clock

Living organisms adapt to the surrounding environment by coordinating different biological tasks with the 24 h day-night cycle of the earth with the help of a cell-based biochemical clock, termed as the circadian clock. Circadian clock generates self-sustaining endogenous rhythms in physiology, behaviour and metabolism that have wide implications in eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Understanding how the clock control of physiology is mediated by temporal expression of genes is critical. A thorough knowledge of this mechanism will lead us to fine-tune the factors accordingly to accomplish wide range of applications, from increasing production of commercially important bioactive molecules (drugs, biofuels etc.) to finding cure for circadian rhythm disorder.

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Phytoplanktons range from bacteria to diverse unicellular eukaryotic microorganisms. Marine phytoplanktons are responsible for half of the global primary production thereby generating valuable oxygen comparable to land plants. They have profound effect on ocean biogeochemical cycles and can directly or indirectly influence marine mammals as well as humans. Their daily physiology and biochemistry is strictly governed by their circadian clocks. Understanding the phytoplankton  clock architecture is extremely interesting and encourages our lab to gain deep understanding of them.

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• Photosynthesis, oxygen evolution, nitrogen assimilation, bioluminescence etc. in marine phytoplanktons are under the clock. Any perturbation in the clock activity due to any kind of stress would be drastic.

• They are an easy system to culture and study, which provides organismal level complexity in a unicellular form.

• Their clocks components are simple and non redundant unlike multicellular eukaryotes. They can be a good model to understand the complex eukaryotic biochemical clocks .

• Many easily quantifiable overt daily physiological rhythms that makes them an excellent system to study the biochemistry and molecular biology underlying the circadian clock.

• Their clock is extremely sensitive to environmental changes and therefore they are convenient models to understand the cross-talk of circadian clocks to stress, metabolism and physiology. 

• They are source of biofuel and many unique commercially important bioactive secondary metabolites whose production is driven by the circadian clock. Manipulating the clock to regulate and enhance the production of metabolites is possible.

• They have diverse clock architecture and hence an interesting system to comprehend the conserved and unique organization of the core circadian oscillator framework across the  eukaryotes. 

•  Some of them are excellent genetic models and genome-editing techniques can be used to generate clock engineered algal cells with enhanced abilities.

 

 

 

 

We use a plethora of high-throughput and cutting edge techniques to study the phytoplankton systems. They include transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics along with standard molecular, genome engineering, cell biology, biochemical, imaging, bioinformatics and computational approaches.