Jeffrey Hall (Nobel 2017)

From Medscape:
Jeffrey Hall Talks About Working at the Capitol and Insect Courtship Songs
Dr Hall: Biological clocks exist in higher plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates. There are different kinds of molecules among those different types of organisms, but the molecules function analogously in a universal manner.

Medscape: The overall mechanism of circadian rhythms does not involve hundreds of gene products, which build and operate the clock, but only a handful clock genes, correct?

Dr Hall: We fruit fly people—Konopka, Young, Rosbash, and a handful of others—found approximately 60 mutants, which defined only about six or eight genes, depending on the species. In other words, 60 new mutants could have defined 60 genes, but what we found was that a few dozen mutations in less than one dozen genes./.../