Researchers devise a new way to plot circadian clock
(Phys.org)—Everyone has an internal clock, that mysterious process which controls sleeping and hunger patterns, but now researchers are finding out that because the internal clock also controls metabolism, it would be helpful to be able to easily chart out a person's personal rhythm because it appears many drugs work better or worse at certain stages of their cycle. Until now, charting out a person's clock has involved taking blood samples every twenty minutes or so over a twenty four hour period and measuring melatonin levels. Now new research by a team in Japan has found what appears to be an easier way. They measure, as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, certain metabolites using just two blood samples over a 12 hour period to prduce an accurate clock.