The first issue of 2021 reflects our life in the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read multiple viewpoints about ways chronobiology intersects with COVID-19, starting with a short perspective from Shaon Sengupta and Garret FitzGerald. You will want to read the “New Investigator” review authored by Xiadong Zhuang with Jane McKeating about the circadian clock and viral infections. A virtual EBRS meeting in July 2020, and careful stewarding from Martha Merrow, led to three more COVID-related reviews follow, pointing you to diverse literatures in immunology, seasonality, and critical care. We have a research article on the association of fatigue with poor sleep quality but not with chronotype. Our final paper is a transcript of the Pittendrigh-Aschoff lecture from the SRBR conference 2020. The current SRBR President, Amita Sehgal, offers her personal story, summarizing her journey in leading Drosophila research to make foundational (some would say timeless) discoveries about circadian clocks and sleep.

A new issue of SRBR’s flagship journal has been published. The second issue of 2021 reflects our shared interest in mechanisms of entrainment. We start with a memorial of Arnold Eskin, a giant in our field and a much-valued friend and mentor. You can enjoy a new review on the multiple opsins important for vision as well as entrainment. The evolutionary perspective of this review will make it of interest to all our readers. The continued question about why jetlag is worse when you are flying east is answered in a new paper from Stephanie Taylor. No time to read? She explains the main message in this short video. Our next paper describes an important consideration for studies of entrainment using male homozygous Per2Luc mice. The surprising absence of a role of melanopsin in effects of circadian lighting on alcohol intake in mice is described in our next paper. We have been hearing a lot about lunar effects on rhythms, and JBR offers an analysis of lunar effects on reproduction in cows. A summary of several studies of the stability of entrainment in people of varied ages allows us to consider translation of our studies to humans. Moving to clinical populations, our final empirical paper demonstrates impact of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and insomnia on rhythm stability and amplitude. An important distinction between entrainment and synchronization is explained in a letter that closes this issue.

Mary Harrington

I would like to announce the release of the new luox platform (https://luox.app/).

luox facilitates calculations of physiologically relevant quantities related to light and lighting from user-supplied spectral power distributions in an easy-to-use web interface.

The platform is described in a companion article in Wellcome Open Research (https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/6-69/), which is currently undergoing peer review.

Development of luox was supported by the Wellcome Trust (204686/Z/16/C), the Society of Light and Lighting (2020 Jean Heap Bursary), and the van Houten Fund of the University of Oxford (VH-148).

For more information about luox, please visit: https://luox.app/About

  

Please click here to read about the following funding opportunity issued by the NCI, NHLBI, NIDA and NINDS.

Responses will be accepted through, May 7, 2021.