Seeing into the future: Proactive adjustments of visual coding by the circadian clock

Circadian clocks are a ubiquitous feature of biology, driving daily rhythms in almost all biological processes. The brain is among the body-systems in which circadian rhythms are most prominent.

Outside the master circadian pacemaker in the hypothalamus, those rhythms have largely been considered as mechanisms to adjust downstream behaviour/physiology.

An open question is whether circadian clocks also regulate the brain’s core function of processing/transmitting information.

Neural circuits are designed to efficiently extract, process and transmit relevant information, but as the optimal solution to this process can be time-of-day dependent, one might predict circadian control.

Excitingly, my unpublished data in the mouse visual-system has revealed that neurophysiological responses to stylised stimuli do indeed vary across circadian time.

This leads me to hypothesise that circadian clocks adjust information processing in the brain to meet predictable variations in demand. I will apply a multidisciplinary, system-level approach to address this hypothesis.

I will determine how the clock optimises information processing across the mouse visual-system; what advantage this provides over well-described adaptive processes; and how this defines visual capabilities across the day.

This work has the potential to establish new general principles of network-plasticity, and promises to advance our understanding of circadian and visual neuroscience.