I am glad to say that the first manuscript from the lab is now available on BioRxiv
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685496v1
We set out to answer a simple question:
If the fruit fly #Drosophila cannot see clearly, how would they #sleep ?
1/8
Discussion
Loading...
Post
For a naive 1st year Biology student, one would think such questions must have been answered long before, considering vision and light sensing are one of the most studied in Drosophila? But it was not the cast around 2020s. Instead, opposing evidence showing in vision can either suppress or enhance sleep depending in the experimental design:
https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsz102
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2020.00993/full
2/8
Visual experience drives sleep need in Drosophila
This is perhaps not surprising as vision are known to maintain one’s wakefulness and the same time providing sleep drive.
We therefore decided to look at the sleep profiles for all the classic mutant lines that affects phototransduction, plus those with defects in histamine transmission as histamine is the major neurotransmitter.
3/8
To make sure the mutants we acquired retain their defects in phototransduction, the first author Yu-Chien Hung teamed up with Ben Warren at Keele University to record electroretinogram.
4/8
Since we used a locomotion-based method to define sleep in Drosophila we also employed a long-forgotten analysis of waking activity: a simple ratio of locomotor activity over wake period, so we can be confident any increased amounts of sleep in mutants are not a result of loss of locomotion (eg http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/35/11029.abstract)
5/8
So, what did we find?
1) Strikingly, seven of the eight tested mutants with mutations in four different phototransduction genes showed less sleep or shorter sleep bouts in the day.
2) artificially hyperpolarising eye photoreceptor also cause similar sleep loss in the day.
This finding supports that Drosophila phototransduction play a role in day sleep drive. We believe this small investigation provides a good reference point to untangle the role of sensory inputs in Drosophila sleep.
6/8
bonfire.cafe
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
Automatic federation enabled