When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include opening of the ion channels during the action potential, the blood clotting cascade, emptying of the urinary bladder, copulation, breastfeeding and childbirth. The last two (and perhaps the last three!) involve the hormone oxytocin. The childbirth, at least in humans, is a canonical example and the standard story goes roughly like this:

When the baby is ready to go out (and there’s no stopping it at this point!), it releases a hormone that triggers the first contraction of the uterus. The contraction of the uterus pushes the baby out a little. That movement of the baby stretches the wall of the uterus. The wall of the uterus contains stretch receptors which send signals to the brain. In response to the signal, the brain (actually the posterior portion of the pituitary gland, which is an outgrowth of the brain) releases hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin gets into the bloodstream and reaches the uterus triggering the next contraction which, in turn, moves the baby which further stretches the wall of the uterus, which results in more release of oxytocin…and so on, until the baby is expelled, when everything returns to normal.

As usual, introductory textbook material lags by a few years (or decades) behind the current state of scientific understanding. And a brand new paper just added a new monkeywrench into the story. Oxytocin in the Circadian Timing of Birth by Jeffrey Roizen, Christina E. Luedke, Erik D. Herzog and Louis J. Muglia was published last Tuesday night and I have been poring over it since then. It is a very short paper, yet there is so much there to think about! Oh, and of course I was going to comment on a paper by Erik Herzog - you knew that was coming! Not just that he is my friend, but he also tends to ask all the questions I consider interesting in my field, including questions I wanted to answer myself while I was still in the lab (so I live vicariously though his papers and blog about every one of them).

Unfortunately, I have not found time yet to write a Clock Tutorial on the fascinating topic of embryonic development of the circadian system in mammals and the transfer of circadian time from mother to fetus - a link to it would have worked wonderfully here - so I’ll have to make shortcuts, but I hope that the gist of the paper will be clear anyway.

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