Why time changes are a struggle

New research in mice reveals why the body is so slow to recover from jet-lag and identifies a target for the development of drugs that could help us adjust more quickly to changes in time zone. The researchers at Oxford University and F. Hoffmann La Roche have identified a mechanism that limits the ability of the body clock to adjust to changes in patterns of light and dark. They show that if you block the activity of this gene in mice, they recover faster from disturbances in their daily light/dark cycle that were designed to simulate jet-lag. The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust and F. Hoffmann La Roche, and is published in the journal Cell . Nearly all life on Earth has an internal body clock that keeps us ticking on a 24-hour cycle, synchronising a variety of bodily functions such as sleeping and eating with the cycle of light and dark in a solar day. When we travel to a different time zone, our body clock eventually adjusts to the local time. However this can take up to one day for every hour the clock is shifted, resulting in several days of fatigue and discombobulation.