news-quote">By properly setting up a damaged biological clock in the cells of the pancreas, you can reduce the risk of diabetes.
Like so much more in our body, metabolism is subject to biological rhythms. This means, for example, that some cells that synthesize hormones for metabolism synthesize them at different times of the day in different ways. In particular, this is the case with insulin and glucagon – the main hormones of carbohydrate metabolism synthesized in the pancreas.
—
–
–
–
Insulin, as we recall, stimulates cells to absorb glucose from the blood. Glucagon causes liver cells to break down glycogen, a polysaccharide in the form of which animal cells store carbohydrate stores; glycogen is broken down to glucose, which immediately enters the bloodstream. As we again remember, such an unpleasant disease as diabetes is associated with insulin: in the case of diabetes of the second type, body cells (primarily liver, muscle and adipose tissue cells) cease to receive insulin signals. If the dynamics of insulin depends on biological rhythms, then maybe diabetes can also occur due to “hourly” anomalies.
A few years ago, employees of the University of Geneva found that if the cells of the pancreas were damaged, their clockwork was disrupted, the release of insulin and glucagon into the blood would be impaired, and the body would be on the verge of diabetes. Those experiments were performed on rodents, they decided to test the results on human cells, and the same thing happened with them: because of a broken clock, hormone secretion was impaired.
In the following experiments, it was decided to take pancreatic cells from patients with type 2 diabetes and compare them with cells of healthy people. Now the task was the opposite – to make sure that with real diabetes, biological rhythms do not work well in the cells of the gland. Since their mechanism is a system of genes and proteins, the clock can be monitored by molecular biology methods: for example, attach a luminous tag to one of these proteins and then observe how the cell glow changes over the course of a day. If the clock works normally, then the fluctuations in the number of “clock” molecules will be visible very well, and these vibrations will occur synchronously in all cells.
In the article in PNAS it is said that the clocks in human diabetic cells did not work well: the vibration amplitudes at the level of the clock molecules were lower than normal (that is, the vibrations were smoother), and the rhythms of different cells were out of sync with each other. As a result, the cells secreted hormones each on its own, without coordination with each other; everything happened in the same way as in cells in which their biological clocks were specially deduced from their system.
According to the authors of the work, pancreatic cells that have lost their rhythm cease to correctly perceive signals associated with food intake. As a result, insulin levels remain low when it should be high, and become high when it should be low. But the situation can be corrected with the help of the substance nobiletin contained in lemon peel.
Nobiletin binds to one of the proteins that control the biological clock – and as a result, the rhythm amplitude was restored in the cells and insulin secretion returned to normal. At the same time, the risk of diabetes should also decrease, but how much it decreases will be clear only after additional studies – after all, while the experiments were performed only with cells, even human ones.
An upset biological clock is associated with diabetes in many ways. For example, we once said that sleepless night alone strengthens the fatty tissue in our body, and that at different times of the day our body takes energy from different sources: if carbohydrates are spent most in the morning, then fats are sent to the metabolic furnace in the evening. If anomalies in the daily rhythms add excess weight, then the chances of getting diabetes will increase – because type 2 diabetes, as you know, goes hand in hand with obesity.
– .
