How pervasive are circadian oscillations?

Circadian oscillations play a critical role in coordinating the physiology, homeostasis, and behavior of biological systems. Once thought to only be controlled by a master clock, recent high-throughput experiments suggest many genes and metabolites in a cell are potentially capable of circadian oscillations. Each cell can reprogram itself and select a relatively small fraction of this broad repertoire for circadian oscillations, as a result of genetic, environmental, and even diet changes.

The time of metabolism: NAD+, SIRT1, and the circadian clock.

The mammalian cell contains a molecular clock that contributes, within each organism, to circadian rhythms and variety of physiological and metabolic processes. The clock machinery is constituted by interwined transcriptional-translational feedback loops that, through the action of specific transcription factors, modulate the expression of clock-controlled genes. These oscillations in gene expression necessarily implicate events of chromatin remodeling on a relatively large, global scale, considering that as many 10% of cellular transcripts oscillate in a circadian manner. CLOCK, a transcription factor crucial for circadian function, has intrinsic histone acetyltransferase activity and operates within a large nuclear complex with other chromatin remodelers. CLOCK directs the cyclic acetylation of the histone H3 and of its own partner BMAL1. A search for the histone deacetylase (HDAC) that counterbalanced CLOCK activity revealed that SIRT1, a nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD(+))-dependent HDAC, functions in a circadian manner. Importantly, SIRT1 is a regulator of several metabolic processes and was found to interact with CLOCK and to be recruited to circadian promoters in a cyclic manner. As many transcripts that oscillate in mammalian peripheral tissues encode proteins that have central roles in metabolic processes, these findings establish a functional and molecular link among energy balance, chromatin remodeling, and circadian physiology.