Winter Lock Discovery Could Impact Pest Management, Human Health

Washington State University researchers said they have discovered what they call a molecular "winter lock" that helps animals stay in a winter state until conditions improve.

The study, published in Science Advances, found that seasonal changes in a gene called timeless can reset the body's internal clock.

Using fruit flies, researchers showed the process changes daily activity and suppresses reproduction during winter.

“We’ve known for a long time that animals use environmental cues to prepare for seasonal changes, but we haven’t understood exactly how that information is integrated by the biological clock,” said Sergio Hidalgo, corresponding author on the study and assistant professor in WSU's College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience. "What we found is that the clock itself can be rearranged into a winter state that helps animals stay there until conditions are favorable enough to switch back to summer mode.”

WSU noted the new study found that alternative splicing, a process that allows the gene to produce different proteins, of the timeless gene plays a critical role in helping fruit flies enter and maintain a winter state, which includes shifted daily activity patterns and reproductive dormancy. The produced protein alters the function of the circadian clock, creating a molecular “winter lock” that remains in place until environmental cues signal it is time to return to a summer state.

“For years, we’ve been studying what is essentially the summer version of the clock,” Hidalgo said. “This work shows that the clock can be remodeled in winter, creating a system that functions differently and helps animals maintain a winter program.”

Hidalgo suspects similar mechanisms exist in agricultural pests and disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes. Understanding how insects determine seasonal timing could provide new ways to disrupt populations by interfering with the biological processes that help them survive changing seasons.

School officials said the findings may also help scientists better understand seasonal influences on human health. Conditions such as seasonal affective disorder and some neurological and psychiatric disorders have been linked to seasonal patterns, though the biological processes driving those changes remain poorly understood.

Click Here to review the results of that WSU research.