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Full-Text Articles in Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology
A Proposal For Robust Temperature Compensation Of Circadian Rhythms, Christian I. Hong, Emery D. Conrad, John J. Tyson
A Proposal For Robust Temperature Compensation Of Circadian Rhythms, Christian I. Hong, Emery D. Conrad, John J. Tyson
Dartmouth Scholarship
The internal circadian rhythms of cells and organisms coordinate their physiological properties to the prevailing 24-h cycle of light and dark on earth. The mechanisms generating circadian rhythms have four defining characteristics: they oscillate endogenously with period close to 24 h, entrain to external signals, suffer phase shifts by aberrant pulses of light or temperature, and compensate for changes in temperature over a range of 10°C or more. Most theoretical descriptions of circadian rhythms propose that the underlying mechanism generates a stable limit cycle oscillation (in constant darkness or dim light), because limit cycles quite naturally possess the first three …