Time for a nuclear meeting: protein trafficking and chromatin dynamics intersect in the plant circadian system

Circadian clocks mediate adaptation to the 24-h world. In Arabidopsis, most circadian-clock components act in the nucleus as transcriptional regulators and generate rhythmic oscillations of transcript accumulation. In this review, we focus on post-transcriptional events that modulate the activity of circadian-clock components, such as phosphorylation, ubiquitination and proteasome-mediated degradation, changes in cellular localization, and protein-protein interactions. These processes have been found to be essential for circadian function, not only in plants, but also in other circadian systems. Moreover, light and clock signaling networks are highly interconnected. In the nucleus, light and clock components work together to generate transcriptional rhythms, leading to a general control of the timing of plant physiological processes.