NAKAMURA Takahiro    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Agriculture    Position   Professor
Research Period	2010/10～2011/03
Research Topic	Neural mechanisms of gonadal steroid hormone effectsin circadian rhythmicity
Research Type	KAKENHI Research
Consignor	Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
Research Program Type	Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research
KAKENHI Grant No.	22890173
Responsibility	Representative Researcher
Representative Person	Takahiro NAKAMURA
Details	Women suffer from a range of sleep disorders with insomnia and hypersomnia being particularly common. In many cases, these sleep disorders are tightly associated with endocrine changes including menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. It has been long speculated that variations of gonadalsteroid hormone levels that occur during this times are closely related to these sleep-wake disturbances. Our goalisto determine the neural mechanisms that underlie gonadal steroids, especially, estrogen driven changes in the circadian timing system. In this study, we tried to identify estrogen sensitive oscillator(s) which estrogen directly influences and lead to change circadian behavioral rhythm in female rodents. We examined rhythms of clock gene expression(PER2) in several target regions in the brainusing immunohistochemistry(in vivo) and luminescent recording methods to measure circadian rhythms of PER2 expression in tissueexplant cultures from cycling PER2 :: LUCIFERASE(PER2 :: LUC) knockin mice(in vitro). We found that PER2 :: LUC rhythm in preoptic area(POA) of the hypothalamus was directly influenced by estrogen treatments. Ultimately, our findings will result in new therapeutic approach
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