About 10 years ago, Joe Bass started working at Northwestern U. This is when he started learning about the potential abnormalities of metabolic clocks and the implications of these abnormalities. The body has a variety of metabolic clocks, Bass said.

Now, an NU study shows that the pancreas, the organ that holds beta-islet cells, which produce insulin, has an independent biological clock.

“We noticed a discrepancy in animals that were gaining weight,” said Bass, an associate professor of medicine. “When an animal gains weight, it should produce more insulin. These animals were gaining weight and not producing more insulin. The question was whether or not a clock could regulate that.”

To prove that the pancreas has its own biological clock, researchers isolated it and used bioluminescence imaging. Their discovery: the pancreas luminesced once every 24 hours, proving the existence of a clock.

In the study, researchers then knocked out the clock genes in the islet-beta cells in the pancreas to see what kind of effect it had on the subject of the study—mice. They discovered animals subjected to this treatment produced lower than normal levels of insulin, impaired glucose tolerance and developed diabetes.

“The results of this discovery extends across both type 1 and type 2 diabetes,” Bass said. Type 1 diabetes is more commonly known as juvenile-onset diabetes and type 2 diabetes is common in individuals with lower insulin production and higher insulin resistance—typically people who are overweight.

Moving forward, Bass said, research needs to be done to learn how this gene transfers from one generation to the next.

Other biological clocks are found throughout the body. According to a press release from Northwestern News, there is a primary circadian clock deep in the brain, and also in the lungs, liver, heart and skeletal muscles. The clocks operate on a 24-hour schedule and are referred to as circadian clocks—circadian is Latin for “about a day.”

While Bass and Biliana Macheya, an NU doctoral candidate and first author of the paper, led the research, members of other universities collaborated on the years-long process.

The findings of the paper, titled “Disruption of the Clock Components CLOCK and BMAL1 Leads to Hypoinsulinemia and Diabetes” were published in the journal “Nature” on June 18.