Selection for long and short sleep duration in Drosophila melanogaster reveals the complex genetic network underlying natural variation in sleep.

ABSTRACT: Why do some individuals need more sleep than others? Forward mutagenesis screens in flies using engineered mutations have established a clear genetic component to sleep duration, revealing mutants that convey very long or short sleep. Whether such extreme long or short sleep could exist in natural populations was unknown. We applied artificial selection for high and low night sleep duration to an outbred population of Drosophila melanogaster for 13 generations. At the end of the selection procedure, night sleep duration diverged by 9.97 hours in the long and short sleeper populations, and 24-hour sleep was reduced to 3.3 hours in the short sleepers. Neither long nor short sleeper lifespan differed appreciably from controls, suggesting little physiological consequences to being an extreme l

SUBMITTER: Harbison ST 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5730107 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature