If the clock is in a hurry.
Relatively recently, a single species of living things - cockroaches, locate the "pendulum", keeping time. Four special cell located under a tiny brain, asked the rhythm of life this insect. Using a thin surgical procedure, these cells can be removed without damaging them, and transplanted to another cockroach.
And what if the transplanted American cockroach "clock" of the European beetle?
Night on Earth does not occur everywhere simultaneously. When the American continent and cockroach quiet day and sleeping (and cockroaches are known to be nocturnal creatures) and its European counterpart running in search of food. After 12 hours the picture changes. Thus, after transplantation of cells from the same cockroach will be two "clocks" that "show" time shift for half a day. By one o'clock cockroach go to sleep, while others cause it to go in search of food. After a while all the operated cockroaches began to develop malignant tumors.
In the course of hours due to the allocation of cockroach-specific hormone. However, tumor development was caused not just a high concentration of this hormone. When transplanted into an insect control clock showing their own time (the amount of the hormone also increases) the cancer does not form.
It may be that cancer cells characterized by a high speed clock?
Scientists decided to see how the change in time the size of a type of cancer cells, the so-called carcinoma, which may develop in the abdominal cavity of mice. The study was conducted using an automatic analyzer of micro specialized computer, which determines the area of ​​the cells and their nuclei.
Velocity measurements in micro-analyzer up to 200 cells per second.
Conducted with the help of this machine study of cancer cells showed that the hours they actually go much faster. Thus, during the resizing of the nuclei of cells carcinoma is only 60-90 minutes, i.e. almost 20 times shorter daily. In this case all the basic properties of biological clocks remain. For example, variations in size of cancer cells persist even when the cells are extracted from the organism mouse. Such a rapid ticking of the clock was discovered and a number of other cancer cells, particularly in bone marrow cells in human blood cancer.
Detect this phenomenon is possible only with automated methods of analysis of micro as well as to assess only two periods of oscillation is necessary to determine the size of an area of ​​60 OOO cells.