Zhang and colleagues have published an ‘atlas’ that maps the 24-hour patterns of expression for thousands of genes in different mouse organs (1). They also looked at the potential effect of the circadian clock on medicines and drug development; an examination revealed that the majority of bestselling drugs target proteins made from genes whose expression changes throughout the day. The data have been made publically available through the CircaDB database. John Hogenesch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and lead researcher on the project, tells us more. What inspired this study? After the human genome project, it was clear there were only about 25,000 genes. After finding the genes, the first thing we wanted to know was where and when they were expressed. At Novartis, to get at this question, we did a large-scale ‘atlas’ of human, mouse, and rat gene expression in around 80 different organs. This became a public resource that is still used today - in Wikipedia or BioGPS. I was also interested in circadian time back then, but it wasn’t until this study that I have been able to more fully explore it.

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