(PRWEB) August 27, 2014
Casey Diekman, assistant professor of mathematical sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), is helping to acquire greater insight into the biological clock that sets the pace for day-to-day life.

Evolution has harmonized the behavior of humans and all other mammals with fundamental rhythms of life that include the cycle of light and dark knowledgeable each day and with seasonal modify. The brain’s circadian clock controls hormone production connected to all-natural patterns of sleep/wake behavior which, when disrupted by experiences such as jet lag or night-shift operate, can have adverse overall health effects. It is a crucial physiological procedure intrinsic to our mood and alertness, but one that has yet to be completely understood.

Gaining higher insight into the biological clock that sets the pace for every day life is the focus of a transatlantic analysis work involving Casey Diekman, assistant professor in NJIT’s Division of Mathematical Sciences. Diekman’s function, which is getting funded by a 3-year grant of a lot more than $ 233,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), could yield new knowledge for the U.S. national BRAIN Initiative — an acronym for Brain Analysis by means of Advancing Revolutionary Neurotechnologies.

Model Contributions

Diekman joined the NJIT faculty in 2013, after post-doctoral perform at the NSF-funded Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State University. His principal goal as the NSF grant’s principal investigator is to create mathematical models that will market understanding of the function that our internal clock’s electrical activity plays in circadian timekeeping, in certain the way the clock responds to the all-natural light/dark cycle.

Diekman is collaborating with Professor Hugh Piggins and Investigation Associate Mino Belle at the University of Manchester in England. Piggins’ laboratory is supplying experimental biological information about electrical activity in the brain at the cellular level, especially with respect to the influence of dynamic changes in gene expression on neurons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. Gene expression is the method by which DNA is translated into proteins, and proteins are the engines of most physiological functions, which includes circadian behavior.

A group of about 20,000 neurons in the hypothalamus, the SCN receives details about the light/dark cycle from the external globe via the retina that can have an effect on the circadian method. “The job of this element of brain is to know what time of day it is,” Diekman says succinctly. It is a job that the SCN also may do without having direct exposure to external light/dark conditions.

Two Vastly Diverse Time Scales

At the neuronal level, the interplay of several ionic currents within SCN neurons produces electrical oscillations on the time scale of milliseconds. Eventually, these electrical signals add up to our day-to-day behavior patterns. Experimentally, the challenge has been to gather information about these currents below precisely controlled light/dark situations in order to study how SCN activity may possibly differ more than a specific period, such as 24 hours. Even though collecting this data is a really labor-intensive procedure, it offers the raw material for Diekman’s mathematical modeling.

A key objective of the resulting model is to integrate the experimental data into a extensive physiological portrait to simulate neuronal activity and clarify the discrete roles of various ionic currents, Diekman explains. And a key mathematical objective is to take details about biological events that happen on a millisecond time scale and establish how they collectively influence 24-hour behavioral patterns. The model can then be employed to make predictions about the circadian time-keeping process that can be verified in the laboratory, and to recommend new experiments that will add to our information in this area.

“We want to recognize the interaction among two various biological ‘oscillators’ operating on two vastly various time scales,” Diekman says.

Preliminary outcomes obtained by Diekman and his research colleagues suggest that the circadian rhythms they are studying comprise a actually intrinsic approach rooted in “hard-wired” neuronal electrical programming. More specifically, as suggested by Diekman’s modeling, the neurons in the SCN will start to enter a state where they are significantly less active in the afternoon. In this state, the neurons’ electrical activity has an specially pronounced effect on gene expression, influencing hormone production and other physiological indicators without having external light/dark exposure. It is a rhythm deeply encoded in our DNA.

As a element of the BRAIN Initiative, Diekman’s work has broader implications as well. He anticipates that deeper understanding of the flow of data involved at the cellular level will aid in the improvement of mathematical models of brain processes such as long-term memory formation. The project also could impact places of mathematical biology beyond circadian rhythms by advancing improvement of laptop-simulation techniques capable of handling broadly disparate time scales.

About NJIT
One particular of the nation’s major public technological universities, New Jersey Institute of Technologies (NJIT) is a best-tier analysis university that prepares students to turn out to be leaders in the technologies-dependent economy of the 21st century. NJIT’s multidisciplinary curriculum and computing-intensive approach to education provide technological proficiency, organization acumen and leadership expertise. With an enrollment of far more than 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students, NJIT delivers small-campus intimacy with the sources of a key public investigation university. NJIT is a worldwide leader in such fields as solar study, nanotechnology, resilient design, tissue engineering, and cyber-safety, in addition to other people. NJIT ranks 5th among U.S. polytechnic universities in study expenditures, topping $ 110 million, and is among the prime 1 % of public colleges and universities in return on educational investment, according to PayScale.com.njit