In what year did humans first discover the genes related to the biological clock?

in 198s, due to the development of molecular biology, the research on biological clock made a breakthrough. In 1971, British scientists found a special fruit fly among the fruit flies they studied, and its biological clock was only 21 hours. It took scientists 14 years until 1985 to find the gene that caused the abnormal biological clock of this fruit fly. This is the first time that human beings have discovered a gene related to the biological clock, and this gene is named period-"cycle". Scientists have been trying to clone similar genes of this gene in other species, especially mammals, but they have not been successful. In 1997, a paper was published in Cell magazine. Through the study of tens of thousands of experimental mice, scientists found that the biological clock cycle of an experimental mouse was 27 hours, and located and cloned the gene with mutation of this nucleic acid, and named it "clock" gene-—ClockGene. At the same time, Dr. Sun Zhongsheng and others screened the chromosome 17 gene on a large scale in order to clone the breast cancer gene. They found that one of the genes showed a certain sequence similarity with the biological clock gene "cycle" of Drosophila, so it was assumed that the gene was a similar gene with the same function in mammals. Through animal experiments, they found that the "periodic" gene has a 24-hour expression rhythm, and the expression of this gene can change with the change of photoperiod. This discovery was named as one of the top 1 scientific and technological breakthroughs by Science magazine because it revealed the molecular biological basis of the biological clock. In recent years, the international community has attached great importance to the study of chronobiology, and put forward the concepts of chronopathology, chronopharmacology and chronotherapeutics. Biological rhythm has become an important subject in clinical, preventive and basic medicine research. The Chinese Academy of Sciences plans to establish an international-level chronobiology research base in China to promote the application of chronobiology in medical clinic in China. Studies show that the human biological clock is 18 minutes slower a day, and the clocks are not synchronized. Japanese scientists recently published a research paper saying that they found that the cycle of human biological clock is 24 hours and 18 minutes. However, other animals and plants have a more obvious gap between this biological clock and the clock. Some animals have a biological clock cycle of 23 to 26 hours, while plants have a biological clock cycle of 22 to 28 hours. Researchers believe that this phenomenon can be explained by Darwin's theory of evolution. Take the bird as an example. If it follows the clock strictly, when it wakes up every morning to feed, it will find that the insects on the tree have been eaten by the birds that flew into the forest first. Therefore, strictly punctual creatures will face the greatest competitive pressure and eventually tend to perish. But why don't the unsynchronized biological clock and the clock accumulate, eventually disrupting our life rules and making us wake up later every day? Researchers say that light will constantly reset the biological clock by affecting hormone levels and body temperature in the body. The researchers used a computer to do an experiment to simulate the evolution of biological clock. Experiments have proved that those biological clock cycles that are most beneficial to competition are indeed close to 24 hours, but they are not particularly close. There is a biological clock hidden in the skin of animals. Professor Okamura of Kobe University in Japan published a paper in the American journal Science, saying that there is a biological clock in the skin tissue of mammals, which is in step with the biological clock in the brain. This discovery may be used to diagnose various diseases caused by biological clock disorder. The scientist found in his experiments on mice that there are a lot of biological clock genes in fibroblasts of mouse skin adhesive tissue. He called the biological clock in the lower part of the cerebral colliculus "mother clock" and the biological clock in tissues and cells such as skin "child clock". He also found that the sub-clock and the mother clock move together, and the mechanism of action is the same. It is believed that the biological clock structure and mechanism of various mammals, including humans, are roughly the same.