Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were awarded the prize for their research on how plants, humans and animals adapt their biological rhythm to synchronize with our planet's day and night cycle, as the earth rotates, in order to control their daily life.
Hall spent most of his career at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where Rosbash still works as a faculty member. Young works out of Rockefeller University in New York. The winners will share a prize of 9 million Swedish kronor, which is around $1.1 million.
All living organisms on Earth have an internal clock, known as the circadian rhythm, which in humans underlies why we are awake during the day and sleep at night.
But our biological clock also helps regulate eating habits, hormone release, blood pressure and body temperature.
The US trio used fruit flies to discover a gene that controls this everyday rhythm and further showed that the gene encoded a protein which "accumulates in the cell during the night and degrades during the day," to regulate this cycle, the committee said in a statement.
According to the Nobel committee, a person's well-being is affected when there is a "temporary mismatch between our external environment and this internal biological clock."
For example, disruption to our clocks when someone travels across a number of time zones results in jet lag.
The committee explained how an imbalance between lifestyle and rhythm could lead to increased risk for a number of diseases including metabolic diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease.
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