Circadian clocks are essential for the function of a wide array of organisms, from cyanobacteria to humans. Despite decades of productive study of these systems, mysteries remain, including why many biological clocks have non-24-hour internal periods. I take a new approach to circadian clocks by focusing on downstream readout of the clock’s state to answer physiologically relevant questions, such as `when will the sun rise?’ Using this framework, I will show that systematic errors arising from sunrise and sunset prediction can be compensated by having non-24 hour internal periods. Lastly, I will discuss new experiments, which both test quantitative predictions from this work and open questions of how multiple timing signals are combined.
Hosts: Michael Abbott (michael.abbott@yale.edu), Isabella Graf (isabella.graf@yale.edu), and Mason Rouches (mason.rouches@yale.edu)
