Quo vadis basic and clinical chronobiology: promise for health maintenance.

Abstract

Chronobiology is the eminently interdisciplinary science of interactions in time among metabolic, hormonal, and neuronal networks. It involves anatomy, biochemistry, microbiology, physiology, and pharmacology, at the molecular, intracellular, intercellular, and still higher levels of organization. The compounds coordinating a time structure--proteins, steroids, and amino-acid derivatives--provide for the scheduling of interactions among membrane, cytoplasmic, and nuclear events in a network involving rhythmic enzyme reactions and other intracellular mechanisms. The integrated temporal features of the processes of induction, repression, transcription, and translation of gene expression remain to be mapped in relation to the available framework, consisting of the sequences of phospholipid and RNA labeling, DNA formation, and mitosis, to delineate a circadian cell cycle upon which further hormonal and neural coordination acts (Halberg et al., 1959a,b, 1979a). There is a need for communication over temporal as well as spatial distances among different specialized structures devoted, in individuals, to metabolism, growth, reproduction, and the ability to adjust, and, in species, to the capacity to adapt. For a better understanding at all levels of behavior in its broader sense of organization in time, chronobiology requires familiarity with temporal aspects of metabolism, hormones, and neurons. In other words, broadly trained, full-time "general practitioners" of a chronobiology in its own right are needed.