Can’t get up in the morning?
23 Feb 2011 by Evoluted New Media
Fruit flies have trouble waking up because they’ve lost a gene dubbed ‘twenty-four’ which disrupts their sleep-wake pattern – a finding which might also explain why humans have trouble getting out of bed in the morning
Fruit flies have trouble waking up because they’ve lost a gene dubbed ‘twenty-four’ which disrupts their sleep-wake pattern – a finding which might also explain why humans have trouble getting out of bed in the morning
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Fruit flies without the gene dubbed twenty-four suffer from irregular sleep-wake patterns |
Scientists from Northwestern University found twenty-four – generic name CG4857 – is critically important in producing a protein called PER, which regulates circadian rhythm in the fruit fly Drosophilia melanogaster. The discovery has important implications for humans.
“The function of a clock is to tell your system to be prepared, that the sun is rising, and it’s time to get up,” said Ravi Allada, who led the research. “The flies without the twenty-four gene did not become active much more before dawn. The equivalent in humans would be someone who has trouble getting out of bed in the morning.”
Allada and his team worked with scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) to screen the behaviour of 4,000 different flies – each with a different overexpressed gene and thus different behaviour – looking for those who had disrupted sleep-wake cycles. Flies with the overexpressed CG4857 gene had a longer cycle of 26 hours.
Researchers knocked out CG4857 and found the flies had very poor sleep-wake rhythm, and would sleep and wake at all times of the day. They discovered very little of the PER protein in the brain neurons.
The known core mechanism of the circadian clock – in both humans and flies – involves the process of transcription, where RNA is produced from DNA. However, researchers discovered that twenty-four operated in translation, where the protein is translated from the DNA – without the gene, RNA was not translated into PER, leading to dysfunction.
“This really defines a new mechanism by which circadian clocks are functioning,” Allada said. “We found that twenty-four has a really strong and critical role in translating a key clock protein. Translation really wasn’t appreciated before as having such an important role in the process.”
The researchers believe it’s likely that a mechanism similar to that described for the fly gene twenty-four will be evolutionary conserved and found in humans.
