Your Hair Reveals Whether You're a Morning Person
Body-clock gene reveals sleep cycles with just a pluck, study says.
That's because the genes that regulate our body clocks can be found in hair-follicle cells, researchers have discovered.
(See "Secrets of Sleeping Soundly Uncovered.")
A tiny portion of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus controls the human body clock, and RNA strands—protein-building chains of molecules—process these signals throughout the body in 24-hour cycles. (Get a genetics overview.)
RNA strands containing the clock genes are found throughout the body—including in white blood cells and the inside of the mouth—but human hair is easiest for scientists to test.
So Makoto Akashi, of the Research Institute for Time Studies at Yamaguchi University in Japan, and colleagues pulled head and beard hairs from
