ArticlePLoS genetics2017
Selection for long and short sleep duration in Drosophila melanogaster reveals the complex genetic network underlying natural variation in sleep.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Trex1 overexpression leads to longer lifespans and fragmented sleep inApplied biological chemistry · 2026Article
- GIGEM (Group Isolation Gauge Effect Metrics), A Software Suite for Analyzing Social Isolation-Induced Sleep Loss and Multi-Batch Experiments inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Early life sleep is associated with longevity inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The inversion In(2L)t impacts complex, environmentally sensitive behaviors inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Capturing continuous, long timescale behavioral changes in Drosophila melanogaster postural data.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- A genome-wide methylation analysis of Chinese Han patients with chronic insomnia disorder.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 2024Article
- Intra-species quantification reveals differences in activity and sleep levels in the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti.Medical and veterinary entomology · 2024Article
- Aedes albopictus colonies from different geographic origins differ in their sleep and activity levels but not in the time of peak activity.Medical and veterinary entomology · 2024Article
- Divergent evolution of sleep in Drosophila species.Nature communications · 2024Article
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- Genome-wide association in Drosophila identifies a role for Piezo and Proc-R in sleep latency.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Orthologs ofSleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2024Article
- Neurofibromin 1 mediates sleep depth in Drosophila.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- Modelling TDP-43 proteinopathy in Drosophila uncovers shared and neuron-specific targets across ALS and FTD relevant circuits.Acta neuropathologica communications · 2023Article
- Article
- Nonlinear expression patterns and multiple shifts in gene network interactions underlie robust phenotypic change in Drosophila melanogaster selected for night sleep duration.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Does EGFR Signaling Mediate Orexin System Activity in Sleep Initiation?International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
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 long or short sleeper. Whole genome sequence data from seven generations of selection revealed several hundred thousand changes in allele frequencies at polymorphic loci across the genome. Combining the data from long and short sleeper populations across generations in a logistic regression implicated 126 polymorphisms in 80 candidate genes, and we confirmed three of these genes and a larger genomic region with mutant and chromosomal deficiency tests, respectively. Many of these genes could be connected in a single network based on previously known physical and genetic interactions. Candidate genes have known roles in several classic, highly conserved developmental and signaling pathways-EGFR, Wnt, Hippo, and MAPK. The involvement of highly pleiotropic pathway genes suggests that sleep duration in natural populations can be influenced by a wide variety of biological processes, which may be why the purpose of sleep has been so elusive.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.