Thursday, February 18, 2016
Caltech Biologists Identify Gene that Helps Regulate Sleep
Caltech biologists have performed the first large-scale screening in a vertebrate animal for genes that regulate sleep, and have identified a gene that when overactivated causes severe insomnia. Expression of the gene, neuromedin U (Nmu), also seems to serve as nature's stimulant--fish lacking the gene take longer to wake up in the morning and are less active during the day.
The findings improve our understanding of how sleep is regulated--a process that we know surprisingly little about despite its clear importance. In the long term, the results suggest Nmu as a potential candidate for new therapies to address sleep disorders.
A paper describing the new screening process and its results appears in the February 17, 2016, issue of the journal Neuron. David Prober, assistant professor of biology at Caltech, began the work as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and has continued the work at Caltech since 2009. The lead authors on the paper are Cindy Chiu (PhD '14), a former graduate student in Prober's lab, and Jason Rihel, who collaborated with Prober at Harvard and now has his own lab at University College London. . .
The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the European Research Council, University College London, the High-Tech Fund of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Ellison Foundation, the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. . .