NBM found an excellent online article (which I have seen before but I forgot) depicting Phase-Response Curves (PRC) to injections of melatonin in humans, rodents and lizards.

Note how the shape is roughly opposite to that of a PRC to light pulses, i.e., at phases at which light elicits phase-delays, melatonin produces advances and vice versa:

The lizard PRC was actually constructed in our lab, about ten years before I joined. The article, though, gives the wrong reference to this:
Underwood, H. and M. Harless (1985). “Entrainment of the circadian activity rhythm of a lizard to melatonin injections.” Physiology & Behavior 35(2): 267-70.
In that paper, lizards were entrained by daily melatonin injections. The PRC was reported in a different paper the following year:
H Underwood (1986) Circadian Rhythms in Lizards: Phase Response Curve for Melatonin, Journal of Pineal Research 3 (2), 187-196.
Update: an alert reader sends a better figure, taken from this freely available recent paper:

My Homepage
My homepage is at http://coturnix.org. It is temporarily stripped to minimal information, but more will come soon.Grab my RSS feed:
-
Join 1,499 other subscribers
Search This Blog:
Archives
Categories
Recent Comments:
Bora Zivkovic on Morning at Triton Angie Lindsay Ma on Morning at Triton Linda chamblee on Morning at Triton Jekyll » Blog… on The Big Announcement, this tim… Mike H on The Big Announcement, this tim… -
Recent Posts
Top Posts
@BoraZ on Twitter:
Tweets by BoraZCC licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.PayPal

Sitemeter






Thanks! Finally that superimposed version which I’ve only read about, not seen before.
Now wouldn’t it be nice if all studies were online in full text, not just those tantalizing abstracts??
😉