Carriers of the mutation are essentially playing catch-up for their entire lives.
Any night owls reading this will be familiar with the struggle of constantly trying to fit into a morning person’s world. And now researchers say they’ve finally identified the genetic typo that causes this social jetlag.
A new study has revealed that many people who stay up late and struggle to wake up in the morning aren’t lazy, their internal clock is simply genetically programmed to run between 2 and 2.5 hours slower than the rest of the population, thanks to a mutation in a body clock gene called CRY1.
“Carriers of the mutation have longer days than the planet gives them, so they are essentially playing catch-up for their entire lives,” says lead researcher Alina Patke from The Rockefeller University in New York.
