Welcome to the Kay Laboratory                                    

                                                                                                                                Image courtesy of Steven Lustig                                                                           

Our Laboratory studies the composition and architecture of circadian networks in plants and animals.  These networks are thought to provide adaptive andvantages to organisms, and are now known to be pervasive in the integration with many other regulatory modules in multiple cell types.  We employ high throughput genomics and chemical biology pipelines to identify network components and apply mechanistic approaches to understand their detailed function and interactions.  In both plant and animal systems we have found that circadian networks are hierarchical and composed of regulatory layers that act at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels.  Increasingly we are finding that circadian regulation is tightly integrated with metabolic networks, and operate with reciprocal regulatory interactions.