A brief history of circadian time

Recent progress in clock research has revealed major molecular components in the mechanisms responsible for circadian time keeping in mammals. The first vertebrate clock mutation (tau) was discovered in the Syrian hamster more than a decade ago and, using the power of comparative genomics, this gene has now been cloned. We now know that tau is the mammalian homologue of a Drosophila circadian clock component (double-time) that plays an important role in regulating clock protein turnover.