Foraging alters resilience/vulnerability to sleep disruption and starvation in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: Recent human studies suggest that genetic polymorphisms allow an individual to maintain optimal cognitive functioning during sleep deprivation. If such polymorphisms were not associated with additional costs, selective pressures would allow these alleles to spread through the population such that an evolutionary alternative to sleep would emerge. To determine whether there are indeed costs associated with resiliency to sleep loss, we challenged natural allelic variants of the foraging gene (for) with either sleep deprivation or starvation. Flies with high levels of Protein Kinase G (PKG) (for(R)) do not display deficits in short-term memory following 12 h of sleep deprivation. However, short-term memory is significantly disrupted when for(R) flies are starved overnight. In contrast, flies

SUBMITTER: Donlea J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3289360 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature