Gene breakthrough brings cure for jet lag closer - but treatment still years off

Dr Stuart Peirson found himself in the media spotlight when his research team at Oxford published a paper last month announcing the discovery of a gene that prevents us from adjusting to new time zones.

The implication is clear: a cure for jet lag is within reach.The gene slows down our ability to adapt to new time zones, Peirson said in an interview with the Sunday Morning Post.

It's the body's inbuilt safety mechanism to stop our internal clock from getting out of sync.

Nearly all life on earth has an internal circadian body clock. It keeps us on a 24-hour cycle, synchronising bodily functions such as eating and sleeping with daily patterns of light and dark.

In mammals the circadian clock is controlled by an area of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) that aligns all the cells in the body in the same biological rhythm. Specialised receptors in our eyes detect any changes and synchoronise our body clock with local time, but this takes time. When we move rapidly from one time zone to another, such as by taking a long-haul flight, it throws that internal mechanism into disarray.

"When you move across multiple time zones the light/dark cycles no longer match the path of your biological clock - and that's what results in jet lag," said Peirson, a senior research scientist who led the research team at Oxford University. "This process takes a long time to reset to the new time zone and it works out about one day for every hour the clock has shifted."