Priya Crosby

Regulation of cellular circadian rhythms.

Priya is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Wellcome Career Development Fellow at the Centre for Cell Biology. She undertook her PhD at the  MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology under the supervision of John O'Neill, where she focussed on the role of cellular metabolism in regulating circadian timekeeping. Priya then became a EMBO Long-term postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Carrie Partch at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she predominantly worked on the structure and function of proteins that regulate cellular circadian rhythms. Priya joined the Institute for Cell Biology in August 2024, where her lab focusses on the cell and protein biology underlying circadian rhythmicity.

portrait photo of Priya Crosby
Priya Crosby

Hannah Coveney and Yuxin Hong


We live on a rotating planet. As a result of evolving within this rhythmic day-night environment, organisms on Earth have developed their own internal biological 'clock' that allows them to anticipate daily external events. These 'circadian rhythms' control almost all mammalian biology, from cell division to metabolism. Our lab uses a combination of cell biology, biophysics and structural biology to understand how these rhythms are regulated at the cellular level. We are currently addressing three key research questions:

How are circadian rhythms controlled at the molecular level?

In mammals, circadian rhythms are regulated by the formation of a series of macromolecular proteins complexes that drive daily rhythms in transcription. By studying these proteins both in cells and in vitro, we can begin to tease apart how these proteins interact to achieve such precise regulation of cellular processes.

How do circadian rhythms align with the outside world?

There is no point in having an internal clock that thinks it’s a totally different time to the time in the outside world. For a circadian rhythm to be useful, it therefore needs to align its timing to specific external events, particularly when we see light and when we eat food. A major focus of our lab is elucidating how these events are integrated by the core circadian protein machinery.

Circadian rhythms in other organisms

While the lab primarily focusses on circadian rhythms in mammals, we also collaborate with other groups to understand how circadian rhythms work across biological kingdoms. This ranges from plants to algae to cyanobacteria. They all have rhythms!


cartoon of the effect of insulin on different cell types

Figure Legend

Post-prandial increases in insulin signaling synchronise circadian rhythms throughout the body with feeding time, by increasing the production of PER clock proteins (Crosby et al 2019, Cell).

Priya Crosby, Hans Clevers, David A. Bechtold & John S. O’Neill – ­­Insulin/IGF-1 drives PERIOD synthesis to entrain circadian rhythms with feeding time – Cell (2019)

​Priya Crosby, Nathaniel P. Hoyle & John S. O’Neill – Flexible measurement of bioluminescent reporters using an ALLIGATOR – Journal of Visualized Experiments (2017) 

Sergio Gil Rodríguez*, Priya Crosby*#, Louise Hansen, Ellen Grünewald, Andrew Beale, Rebecca K. Spangler, Beverley M. Rabbitts, Carrie L. Partch, Alessandra Stangherlin, John S. O’Neill & Gerben van Ooijen# – Potassium rhythms couple the circadian clock to the cell cycle – bioRxiv (2024) 

​Priya Crosby, Nicolette F. Goularte, Chelsea L. Gustafson, Diksha Sharma, Effei Chen, Gian Carlo G. Parico, Jon M. Philpott & Carrie L. Partch – CHRONO participates in multi-modal repression of circadian transcriptional complexes – bioRxiv (2023)

Priya Crosby & Carrie L. Partch – New insights into non-transcriptional regulation of mammalian core clock proteins – Journal of Cell Science (2020)

Alicia K. Michael*, Lisa Stoos*, Priya Crosby, Carrie L. Partch, Jerome S. Menet & Nicolas H. Thomä – Basic helix-loop-helix transcription factors MYC-MAX and CLOCK-BMAL1 associate with histones for E-box access – Nature (2023)


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