Nature invented clocks billions of years ago, the descendants of which still tick in the cells of your body. More than two centuries ago, John Harrison blended lignum vitae wood, brass, bronze and steel components to compensate for changes in temperature and pressure and produced chronometers of remarkable accuracy. Now Harrison’s mission is to be continued by the £8 million European project, Euclock, involving scientists in 11 nations. The project has been launched to find the secrets of nature’s timepieces, including a novel project to recreate one. This synthetic biological timepiece will help them to lay bare the secrets of biological clocks — the way flowers open and close, the beating of the heart and the remarkable emergence of periodic cicadas every 17 years.

Although we talk of the “body clock”, there is no single chronometer in the body, but a superclock: timepieces probably reside in every one of our cells. Being a little inaccurate (left to their own devices, days would last longer than 24 hours) they are reset by various cues, the most important being light picked up by a tiny region of the brain called the SCN. Perhaps, by the action of hormones such as melatonin, the SCN ensures all the peripheral clocks show the same “body time”.

Prof. Andrew Millar, of the University of Edinburgh, will seek inspiration from the biological clocks in our cells, which consist of interlinked cycles of waxing and waning proteins. The project aims to see if we really understand these clocks and how they are entrained, which is increasingly important for the health of our 24-hour society.

Prof. Millar, working with Dr Alex Webb, at Cambridge University, showed that mutant plants with altered timepieces grew at only half the rate of well-timed plants, since the process of photosynthesis that the plants use to harness light depends on correct timing.

While some teams in Euclock will be studying genetic differences that make some people larks (early risers) and others owls (nocturnal), Prof. Millar is drawing on the design of natural clocks to model a synthetic gene circuit. The next step is to recreate it in yeast, which is thought to lack any 24-hour rhythm. Once Prof. Millar’s team has developed the clock’s components, a prototype clock will be assembled by Prof. Ferenc Nagy’s team in Szeged, Hungary. The Hungarians will place the key genes and proteins into yeast to see if they trigger the same rhythmic signals that humans experience.
The understanding that will come from this effort offers many opportunities to play with time. It may be possible to manipulate clocks in implanted cells, so they can deliver doses of drugs when they work at the right time. They could be used to alter when plants flower and produce fruit. And they could shed light on why humans sleep when they do, how quickly patterns can be changed, and what causes sleeplessness. Besides helping to improve the treatment of jet lag, the new understanding should help shift workers who suffer more heart disease and metabolic illnesses.

Dr Mick Hastings’ team at the Medical Research Council’s laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge recently found one reason for the havoc caused by working nights: the ability of the liver to process meals and to deal with potentially toxic metabolites follows a regular daily cycle. When this sequence is disrupted, as in mice with genetic disorders of the body clock, or in people subject to shift work, jet lag, sleep disorders and simple old age, these metabolic cycles will be compromised, leading to serious long-term illness. More basic questions could also be tackled.

Did clocks evolve to harness the metabolisms of living things to the cycle of day and night to make them use energy most efficiently? Or was it more important for them to evolve to help to hide the delicate process of reading genes and copying DNA at night, away from the disruptive effects of ultraviolet light? The answers may lie in a dish of yeast cells that glow green — like clockwork.

The Daily Telegraph