Construction of a Rhythm Transfer System That Mimics the Cellular Clock

Creation of an artificial oscillating gene expression. system is one of the most challenging issues in synthetic biology. Here, we constructed a simple system to manipulate gene expression patterns to be circadian, reflecting the intrinsic cellular clock, by fusing a core clock protein, BMAL1 or CLOCK,, with a zinc finger type DNA binding domain. Circadian rhythmic gene expression was induced only when the target gene contained zinc finger binding sequences. To our knowledge, this simple approach is the first to Manipulate gene expression patterns into circadian rhythms and would be applicable to various endogenous genes.