Final Report Summary - MIRNACLOCKNETWORKS (Towards a systemic view of the circadian clock: Integration of miRNAs into the molecular, cellular and neural circadian networks.)
During the tenure of the ERC project we have: 1) determined that post-transcriptional control of the master regulator Clk denoises circadian transcription in time and space; 2) developed an ex vivo brain culture system in combination with circadian fluorescent reporters, which allow us to follow circadian transcription continuously from cultured brains; 3) developed a high-throughput annotation and quantification RNA-sequencing based approach; 4) performed a global genome-wide assessment of transcriptional and post-transcriptional control of the circadian system in normal conditions and under temperature perturbation and 5) performed a double interaction screening for revealing functional inter-relationships between different components and pathways of the timekeeping machinery.
All these experiments allowed us to examine properties of the circadian as a whole (from the single cell to the neuronal network level) and to understand key properties of the compensatory responses behind the robustness of the circadian system.