Engineering an Internal Clock

June 15, 2015

(Harvard Magazine) – Non-scientists generally think of “circadian clock” as a metaphoric term. There’s nothing literally ticking away inside the human body, helping align it to the regular cycle of day and night. But synthetic biologists from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created something just that tangible: a transplantable, bioengineered 24-hour clock, which functioned by itself after being inserted into a bacterium that doesn’t typically have a circadian rhythm.