Gold medalist finds her rhythm

Dawn Wiseman

As a teenager in Swift Current, Sask., Elaine Waddington Lamont (Psychology) suffered from insomnia. She knows the wakeful nights inspired her research, “If you can’t sleep, the whole idea of it becomes fascinating.” She never expected them to produce awards.

At fall convocation on Nov 20, Waddington Lamont received the 2006 Governor-General’s Gold Medal as Concordia’s most outstanding graduate student. The award came as a complete surprise. “You always work hard and try your best,” she said, “But when I opened the letter, I was floored.”

Waddington Lamont’s PhD research was conducted under the supervision of Shimon Amir at the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology. The research for her dissertation produced results that were “a bit of a surprise.”

Circadian rhythms are biological rhythms with a daily beat – things like body temperature, hormone secretion, sleeping, feeding, etc. They are present in just about every living organism and have been recognized for close to 300 years. It is only in the last 30, however, that we have gained any understanding of how they work.

Humans have a master circadian “clock” located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a tiny section of the brain near the pituitary gland. It is reset daily by exposure to light. When it resets, so do all the rhythms it metres. While this seems incredibly simple, Waddington Lamont explains that it makes good evolutionary sense. “Any animal which is in synch with its environment is more likely to survive.”

Within the last 10 years, the discovery of clock genes has led to the development of techniques that allow researchers to watch the clock ticking. What they have found is that each of us has not one clock but many, all over the body. In fact, said Waddington Lamont, “there’s probably one in every single cell.”

Using these techniques with rats, Waddington Lamont marked a protein (Period 2) known to be expressed by the master clock. Not only did she find clocks in other regions of the brain, she was the first to demonstrate the presence of clocks in a number of regions of the limbic forebrain, which is a primary centre for emotion, motivation and memory.

She then demonstrated that while the master SCN clock of rats can only be reset by light, these other clocks can easily and rapidly be reset by other stimuli like food and hormones. Moreover, she found that these clocks can be uncoupled from the master clock in the SCN to work independently.

As her supervisor explained, the discovery has great potential. “First, it provides a way to study how the SCN master clock controls rhythmicity within anatomically defined structures that are known to be involved in the regulation of motivated behaviour and emotional state. Second, it provides a way to study how motivationally relevant events can directly affect and even disrupt specific behavioral and physiological circadian rhythms downstream from the master clock. Elaine’s findings that circadian clocks in the limbic forebrain can be uncoupled from the SCN clock in response to certain hormonal and behavioral perturbations shed new light on the nature of circadian dysregulation associated with clinical conditions such as depressive illness, as well as with things such as jet lag and rotational shift work.”

Shift work is exactly what Waddington Lamont is now studying. With a postdoctoral fellowship from the Institut de recherche en santé et en sécurité du travail (IRSST) she is working at the Douglas Hospital to determine how shift workers can adjust to their changing schedules as rapidly as possible. Thinking back to her teenage years, she said, “They’re all healthy volunteers … and truly excellent sleepers.”