A robust two-gene oscillator at the core of Ostreococcus tauri circadian clock

Pierre-Emmanuel Morant (1, 2) , Quentin Thommen (1, 2) , Benjamin Pfeuty (1, 2) , Constant Vandermoëre (1, 2) , Florence Corellou (3) , François-Yves Bouget (3) , Marc Lefranc (1, 2)

1 PhLAM - Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Atomes et Molécules - UMR 8523
2 IRI - Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire [Villeneuve d'Ascq]
3 LOMIC - Laboratoire d'Océanographie Microbienne

The microscopic green alga Ostreococcus tauri is rapidly emerging as a promising model organism in the green lineage. In particular, recent results by Corellou et al. [Plant Cell, 21, 3436 (2009)] and Thommen et al. [PLoS Comput. Biol. 6, e1000990 (2010)] strongly suggest that its circadian clock is a simplified version of Arabidopsis thaliana clock, and that it is architectured so as to be robust to natural daylight fluctuations. In this work, we analyze time series data from luminescent reporters for the two central clock genes TOC1 and CCA1 and correlate them with microarray data previously analyzed. Our mathematical analysis strongly supports both the existence of a simple two-gene oscillator at the core of Ostreococcus tauri clock and the fact that its dynamics is not affected by light in normal entrainment conditions, a signature of its robustness.

Mots clés: horloges circadiennes; réseaux génétiques; oscillations

Domaines: Bio-Informatique, Biologie Systémique [q-bio.QM]; Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]; Réseaux moléculaires [q-bio.MN]

Pierre-Emmanuel Morant, Quentin Thommen, Benjamin Pfeuty, Constant Vandermoëre, Florence Corellou, et al.. A robust two-gene oscillator at the core of Ostreococcus tauri circadian clock. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 2010, 20 (4), pp.045108. ⟨10.1063/1.3530118⟩. ⟨hal-00544986⟩