Welcome to the comparative chronomics group!

Our mission is to understand how organisms tell the time using modern biological data science approaches and make people aware of why biological time is important.

Biology is becoming more and more of a data science each year. This is easy to see in fields such as genomics, and a cursory search of the literature will show that chronobiologists have been operating in the genomics space since its inception. However, the recent lurch in interest in the biological sciences towards data science gives the opportunity to try and understand biological timing systems in breadth and detail as never before. The language that used to underpin the study of biological timing systems of the twentieth century; genetics, chronobiology, circadian clocks are now somewhat redundant. We use many terms which we have defined ourselves. Many of these are not published - so don't worry if people don't recognise them.

Our group name encapsulates our approach to science. Comparative chronomics is the study of the diversity of biological clocks between species, individuals and systems. Comparative biology is a term little used these days, but there is much that can be learnt from going out to look at time keeping mechanisms in organisms that were previously too costly or difficult to measure from.

The data science revolution in chronobiology is best viewed as not being in genomics and transcriptomics, that has been there for the past 25 years. Rather, we are pioneering how we can revisit old concepts in modern ways. We use the term digital physiology to refer to the high throughput physiological measurements we take, such as imaging the beating heart of a zebrafish or a Daphnia for five days in vivo, or measuring circadian rhythms in bioluminescence from gene edited macroalgae.

How do we make people aware of the importance of biological time? The understanding of the place of circadian biology in medicine has been a long time in coming. We are helping to push this forwards coining the term “Chronomic Medicine", as the intersection between genomic medicine (the modern term for human genomics) and chronobiology. Although we do a lot of conventional outreach, widening participation and public engagement our core outreach is to other scientists. From the biologists who use rhythmic genes as their experimental controls, to the medics who don't know there are 24 hour rhythms in basic physiology. These are the people who will benefit the most from knowing about our work, and they are probably the people sitting next to you in your lecture halls and seminar rooms.

Due to the huge area that comparative chronobiology, data science and genomic medicine cover our research, protocols and language encompasses a wide area. Many of you joining us will belong to just one of those communities, and have little knowledge or experience outside of that.

Hopefully this lab guide will help you to understand our ways of working, and you will enjoy your time in the chronomics group.

Tim Hearn PI 2021