Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News
“Feed a cold, starve a fever,” or so the adage goes. But fruit fly experiments suggest that sleep may be a better remedy.
A microbe-fighting protein helps control how much and how deeply fruit flies sleep, researchers report in the Feb. 1 Science. That’s evidence that sleep speeds recovery from illness, they conclude.
“We finally have a very clear link between being sleepy and fighting an infection,” says Caltech sleep researcher Grigorios Oikonomou, who was not involved in the work. Such a link has been hinted at but never formally demonstrated, says Oikonomou, who coauthored a commentary on the study in the same issue of Science.
Researchers in Amita Sehgal’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine made the discovery while searching for genes that control sleep. Her team looked for proteins that, when overproduced, would cause Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies to sleep more. After combing through more than 8,000 overproduced proteins, the researchers found just one that lulled flies to sleep.
Flies with an overabundance of that protein, produced from the nemuri gene, took more…
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