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Some people seem to need less sleep: it is in their genes (2016-01-20)

You may have wondered why some people seem to need less sleep. Is it in their genes? It turns out that it likely is. A number of so called short-sleeper genes, which are associated with little need for sleep, have recently been identified through years of arduous research and serendipity.

Now, researchers at the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) have advanced sleep genetics research by developing a new method for monitoring mouse sleep cycles. The Snappy Sleep Stager is a non-invasive, automated sleep cycle monitoring system based on mouse respiration, or breathing. Compared with other monitoring systems that require surgical implants or many hours of human intervention the Snappy Sleep Stager is simple to operate and allows more mice to be studied during one experiment. By combining it with a new system for developing nearly perfect knock-out mice, they have identified a new short-sleeper gene, Nr3a.

Sumiyama says he was not surprised at the improved efficiency and that the research went quite smoothly but he admits the greater challenge is high efficiency “knock in” animals, saying, “Insertion of a gene is much more difficult than removing it.”

According to Kenta Sumiyama, a co-first author of the research, from RIKEN QBiC., “You can target any disease caused by a genetic mutation” with the triple CRISPR method. In the current research the scientists found that the Nr3a gene, a member of the NMDA receptor family, is a short-sleeper gene. “The implications are wide ranging,” says Genshiro A. Sunagawa of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, a first author of the paper. “As the NMDA receptor is associated with schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and depression, all of which are known to involve sleep disturbances.”

In addition to these disorders, sleep cycle disturbances are known to be associated with many health issues.”

For more information
Genshiro A. Sunagawa, Kenta Sumiyama, Maki Ukai-Tadenuma, Dimitri Perrin, Hiroshi Fujishima, Hideki Ukai, Osamu Nishimura, Shoi Shi, Rei-ichiro Ohno, Ryohei Narumi, Yoshihiro Shimizu, Daisuke Tone, Koji L. Ode, Shigehiro Kuraku and Hiroki R. Ueda,
"Mammalian reverse genetics without crossing reveals Nr3a as a short-sleeper gene"
Cell Reports, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2015.12.052”I
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