Changing the time on your body clock

In experiments designed to target and reduce the SIK1 protein, the lab animals could rapidly adjust their body clock, when it was shifted to a time zone +/- six hours of the original one. This being the equivalent of the jet lag you receive from a flight from Melbourne to Dubai or Los Angeles. In fact mice with reduced production of SIK1 adjusted so well that they were over their jet lag, as judged by measuring their bodily functions ,within 24 hours under controlled conditions.

Now this has serious ramifications for human sufferers of jet lag but could also be expanded to people working night shifts. If the corresponding gene to SIK1 in humans could be reduced and the breaks to adjusting time shift could be lifted the ill effects to your health and well-being could be ameliorated . Of course the biologists' dream is to achieve a SIK 1 like break protein that can be turned on and off rapidly and efficiently maybe through the delivery of a molecule through a dermal patch or a nasal aerosol delivery device.

Of course the turn off of SIK1 could be engineered to occur in response to environmental triggers. These could be chemical in nature or maybe more intriguingly mediated by harmless radiation. Curing the severest jet lag might in the future be as easy as wearing a pair of wearable light emitting glasses, like the one developed by Flinders University researchers, and wearing them for half an hour when you arrive at your destination. The specific spectra of the light received will have the dual benefit of triggering SIK 1 down regulation and aiding in the speeded up entrainment of the circadian cycles modulated by melatonin.

I can see a brisk trade in the shares of the Pharmaceutical company which comes up with a delivery system for the light controlled down regulation of the SIK 1 protein together with a matching pair of glasses that deliver the required light of the appropriate spectra for the necessary adjustment of your body clock.

Shifting your body clock could in the future will be almost as easy as changing the time on your wrist watch to the new time at your port of arrival.