The Millar research
group
www.amillar.org;
SynthSys
Seminars; Andrew's pages on
Edinburgh Research Explorer
News (old news is here)
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Chair of Synthetic Biology in SynthSys, deadline 8th April 2013. Informal enquiries |
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PhD studentship linking sys bio and crop science models STILL AVAILABLE to start Oct 2013. |
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Alexandra's updated plant clock model explains TOC1 function, accepted in BMC Sys Bio 2013. |
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Andrea's machine learning suggests repressilator in Ostreococcus, Bioinformatics 2013 |
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Elisa's work shows Ostreococcus plasticity varies with location not relatedness, Nature Climate Change 2013 |
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SynthSys' SBSI model optimisation software note in Bioinformatics 2013 |
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Congratulations to Gerben van Ooijen, starting his lab as Royal Society Fellow. |
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Gerben's review of non-transcriptional timing published in TiBS 2012 |
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Video protocol for Ostreococcus transformation published in JoVE 2012 |
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Coupled clocks make spatio-temporal waves, in PNAS 2012. Numerical data are public in BioDare |
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Non-transcriptional clock marker shared across all domains of Life, in Nature 2012 |
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Flowering model's predicted function of FKF1 is validated, in Science 2012 |
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Clock model's predicted function of TOC1 is validated, in Science 2012 |
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Extended model finds repressilator in the plant clock, in Mol. Syst. Biol. 2012 |
Biological Clocks
Plants, fungi, animals, some bacteria and archaea have internal, 24-hour clocks. These "circadian" clocks affect our lives in many ways, through industry, agriculture and human health.
Web tutorials on biological clocks: try these old pages first, if circadian clocks are new to you.
Our Research
Our research aims to understand how the circadian clock is constructed and adjusted, how it affects plant life and why the clock mechanisms are so complex. Among the cogs of the biological clockwork are a small set of genes that rhythmically regulate each other's activity. We study these "clock genes" in Arabidopsis, which is a small plant with a big following, and the marine alga Ostreococcus, which is one of the smallest eukaryotic cells. Molecular genetics and transgenic plants/algae help us by revealing rhythms that are usually invisible: we use a reporter gene called luciferase to send us video footage when other genes are active, like the 24-hour loop at the top of this page. We are also studying how biological rhythms benefit the organism by controlling metabolism, growth and seasonal flowering times, using quantitative timeseries experiments and mathematical modelling.
The circadian clock is an excellent system to develop new methods in Systems Biology, as we do with many collaborators in SynthSys. Mathematical modelling helps us to understand the complex data and to identify the principles behind the molecular detail. We were using the simpler clock of Ostreococcus to test those principles, when we also discovered a different, non-transcriptional clock mechanism that does not require rhythmic gene activity. We are now using proteomics and chemical biology to identify the cogs and gears of this ancient clock.
Andrew Millar holds a Chair of Systems Biology in SynthSys at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously involved in the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA), in GARNet, the UK's Arabidopsis research network, and was founding Director of SynthSys' predecessor, the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh (CSBE). A short biography is available.