Rhythmic breakdown explains daily patterns in gene and protein activity

Approximately 30% of circadian transcripts in mouse liver and Drosophila heads may be influenced by rhythmic posttranscriptional regulation.

• Circadian cellular outputs impact thousands of genes across various cell types.
• Transcript peak abundances do not consistently align with gene-expression activity peaks.
• Circadian degradation of mRNAs and proteins may critically influence the timing of their peaks.
• A theoretical framework was developed to describe the amplitudes and phases of biomolecules with circadian half-lives.
• The framework successfully explains both transcriptome and proteome studies, including unexpected timing of transcript and protein appearances.

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