Circadian rhythms represent a known biological process that possess an endogenous and entrainable oscillations of roughly 24 hours occurring in living things, which includes plants, animals as well as fungi. Neurospora crassa, is an organism that has well-characterized emergent properties of circadian rhythm. However, intercellular communication on this system is still not well known. We have recently been able to observe synchronicity of cells over time in interactive cell populations. Hence, we hypothesize that cells are able to communicate their circadian time to each other, resulting in phase synchronization. To explore the nature of this phenomenon, we measured the fluorescence of two recorder constructs, mVenus a yellow fluorescent protein as well as a red fluorescence construct, mCherry that are both driven by a clock-controlled gene-2 promoter (ccg-2p). mChery was given an additional amount of light relative to mVenus to produce a phase-shift before placing it in the dark for measurement. Pure populations as well as a 50:50 mixture of mCherry and mVenus recorders were fluorescently detected every half an hour over ten days. Experiment was repeated twice by entraining one population of cells each time with a varying amount of time. This work offers fundamental insights about the circadian synchronicity in Neurospora crassa on a single cell as well as a population scale.

Cellular clocks in Neurospora crassa demonstrate synchronization

2019 Spring National Meeting

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