EXERCISE seems to reset the daily clock in our muscles independently of the brain’s central clock. This finding could overturn the dogma that the central clock controls all the clocks in other organs.
Bruce Conklin’s team at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that the muscle clock could be reset independently by asking four male volunteers to exercise only one leg. The following evening and morning, he took muscle samples from both legs using a needle. The exercised leg muscles expressed four clock genes more strongly than those in the other leg, suggesting its local clock had been reset (Genome Biology, 4:R61). If the brain’s…
