The Biological Clock: How Your Body Keeps Time
Your body keeps time, and the clock isn't in your brain. It's inside your cells. Billions of them each run their own timer, built from a small set of genes that switch each other on and off in a repeating cycle of roughly 24 hours.
That cycle lets cells prepare for what's coming instead of simply reacting to it. Your liver gets ready to process food before you eat. Your body temperature drops before you fall asleep. The same system is stable enough to run reliably for a lifetime, yet a single long-haul flight can throw it out of sync for days.
In this Growth Lab LIVE session with Keith Kennedy, you'll find out how a cell can tell the time with no hands, no pendulum and no battery.
Keith will show how a few interacting genes form a working clock, and how your brain keeps billions of these clocks in step so your body acts as one coordinated system. He'll explain what happens when that coordination breaks down, why jet lag hits different organs at different speeds, and why some disruptions clear in a day while others take a week. You'll also see how researchers use mathematical models to predict how living systems behave before running a single experiment.
Keith Kennedy is a postdoctoral researcher in the Dynamical Systems Biology group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he builds mathematical models that predict how biological systems change over time, from single genes to whole organisms. He studied Mathematics in the United States before completing a PhD in Biomedicine in Barcelona, and teaches systems biology to students learning to model living processes.
What you'll learn
How a handful of genes create a reliable 24-hour clock inside every cell
Why your brain coordinates your body's clocks rather than setting them, and what goes wrong when it loses control
What jet lag does at a cellular level, and why your organs recover at different speeds
How mathematical modelling predicts biological behaviour, and how that way of thinking applies to problems well outside the lab
Agenda:
1845h - Doors open
1900h - Talk starts
1945h - Q&A
2015h - Drinks & Networking
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