“Raising awareness about fundamental mechanisms of sleep is of general interest for society as millions of Canadians suffer from sleep disorders,” adds coauthor van Meyel, a professor of neurology at the McGill Centre for Research in Neuroscience and the BRaIN Program of the RI-MUHC. “Our research adds wakefulness to the growing list of fruit fly behaviors where glial cells play an important regulatory role, which includes circadian rhythms, movement, courtship, learning, and memory,” says Emilie Peco, a lead author of the study and a research associate in the lab of Don van Meyel, at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and located at the Montreal General Hospital. When present, Eaat2 promoted wakefulness by limiting the length and intensity of sleep periods. The authors found that fruit flies lacking the Eaat2 gene were excessively sleepy during the day. Like humans, fruit flies are highly active during the day and sleep throughout the night. They uncovered a gene that encodes the membrane transport protein known as excitatory amino acid transporter 2 or Eaat2. Sleep and wakefulnessįor the study, researchers sought to identify new genes affecting sleep and wakefulness in Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies), which share 75 percent of the genes that cause diseases in humans and display all of the behavioral and physiological characteristics of sleep. There is growing evidence that glial cells (or glia), long thought to simply “support” neurons in the brain, are actually quite important for diverse aspects of sleep regulation. Over the course of a lifetime, more than 30 percent of people will experience a sleep disorder, which is associated with a number of diseases including Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It is critical for immune function, stable metabolism, brain repair, learning, and memory. Sleep is an essential behavioral state in animals ranging from invertebrates to humans.
Researchers have discovered a new mechanism that regulates sleep in fruit flies that involves glial cells and their ability to manage a common ingredient in many energy drinks.
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