Why are the first hours of the day when asthma attacks and other heart attacks occur more often? It was in an attempt to answer this that Israeli researchers carried out a study, the results of which appeared in the journal Cell Metabolism (Source 1).
The research team reports discovering that a key element of our circadian clockgoverning our biological rhythms, would also regulate our body’s response to lack of oxygen. This is how our internal 24-hour molecular clockfunctioning in each cell, which undergoes changes during the day and night, and which could affect the appearance of diseases linked to the oxygen cycle in our body.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded in 2019 to three researchers who discovered the hypoxia-inducible factor (or drop in blood oxygen) HIF-1α, a factor that determines how each cell responds to lack of oxygen. oxygen.
So, as long as there is enough oxygen, this factor is unstable and decomposes quickly, while it stabilizes in case of lack of oxygen, accumulates and penetrates into the nuclei of our cells, to activate many genes essential for survival in hypoxia.
Discovery of a protein that stabilizes this key factor
But this factor would not be the only one at play. According to the results of the study, carried out in mice, the BMAL1 protein, a key component…
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