Columbia University will award the 2011 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize to Professor Emeritus Jeffrey C. Hall (BIOL) and Prof. Michael Rosbash (BIOL) and Michael W. Young, a researcher at Rockefeller University, for their studies conducted on the molecular basis of the circadian rhythm, according to Newswise.com.

The circadian rhythm is an intrinsically driven, roughly 24-hour cycle in biochemical, physiological and behavioral processes synchronized to the period of the day.

This cycle is a fundamental aspect of behavior in humans and all other animals.

The molecular cloning of the gene, which is required to maintain circadian rhythms in the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila, was first achieved independently in 1984 at Brandeis by Hall and Rosbash, and by Young who was then working at Rockefeller University, wrote Newswise.com.

Subsequent collaborative research conducted at the Hall and Rosbash laboratories, and the separate research of the Young laboratory, made additional discoveries crucial to understanding the comprehensive molecular mechanism by which the 24-hour clock is maintained and adjusted in response to artificially altered lengths of day, according to the website.

This mechanism was later found to be applicable to both insects and mammals.

"This year's Horwitz Prize," said Wayne A. Hendrickson, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University, "recognizes profound and far-reaching discoveries in molecular genetics. This work impacts physiology fundamentally, and it has medical implications as well," according to Newswise.com.

The understanding of the intrinsic biological clock has direct implications for several human disorders. Hereditary sleep disorders, for example, map directly to the human gene of the Drosophila gene, providing a solid basis for the development of treatments for sleep and rhythm disorders, according to the website.

"One of the best things about this research," said Hall on Newswise.com, "was that the results came out better than we, or at least I, intended. Taking a semi-major step toward elucidating the molecular basis of circadian rhythms in drosophila was rewarding enough.

"Little did we know," he said, "back then in the 1980s, that our findings had the potential to apply to an appreciable proportion of the biological writ at large—beyond a matter of the ‘first clock gene cloned,' proceeding to how this gene functions in Drosophila. This, too, turned out to have broader than insect-bound significance."

According to Newswise.com, Lee Goldman, M.D., executive vice president of Columbia University and dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, said "It's not often that researchers make discoveries that so quickly change our basic understanding of the biological world. This work by Hall, Rosbash, and Young did exactly that."