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shikha's picture

Sleep Study in Drosophila

Submitted by shikha on Tue, 04/21/2009 - 4:18pm.
Our conversation about sleep has brought to my mind a paper I recently read about an experiment done on sleep in Drosophila. They kept Drosophila awake mechanically (I presume by shaking the test tube) and in one of the many experiments, used Western blots to determine the protein level in the brain. They found that the levels of proteins that are important parts of synapses were high if the flies were sleep deprived and low if they were not. Thus, the data suggests that sleep may play a role in maintaining a homeostatic balance of some synaptic proteins.

I wish they had done some cognitive tasks with the sleep deprived flies to see if sleep deprivation has the same effect on cognition and memory in flies as it does in humans and other organisms.

While it is not completely clear why sleep is so important, these studies (especially those done in mammals) can help get closer to the answer.

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