The “Sleep-duration” Gene

TAG of the Week:

The “Sleep-duration” Gene

Dr. Maggie Pearce explains the discovery and promise of a recent journal article by Allebrandt et al. According to Allebrandt et al. and their research on the ABCC9 gene in Drosophila (fruit flies), this gene is related how much sleep we need per night. Although this is a very interesting discovery, how can we be sure that the SNP in the ABCC9 gene actually causes the 5% difference in sleep duration among people? Can Allebrandt et al. declare that ABCC9 really is the cause of difference in human sleep patterns, if their experiments were done in Drosophila or does this call for more experimentation and investigation? If you could design an experiment to test this gene’s impact on sleep duration, how would it be different that Allebrandt et al.?

Dr. Pearce’s Article: http://www.thetech.org/genetics/news.php?id=149

In another article by the BBC, expert Neil Stanley said that there are many genes associated to sleep patterns. He also said, "It's interesting to know about these genes, but in a way our genes are an irrelevance unless you were actually to obey them - but none of us do that." (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15999489)

 This seems to contradict the last paragraph of Dr. Maggie Pearce’s article that you read. Do you agree more with Dr. Pearce or Neil Stanley? Why?

Sleepless in Genomics

TAG of the Week:  "Why People Can Run on Little Sleep"

"My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health," says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. "Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies."

Do you think that by taking a gene variant and exploiting it to manipulate our body so we can accomplish more things in the day  is a good idea or a harmful one? Do you think that with more waking hours people would be more productive or wasting more time? How important do you think it is to have sleep and to allow your body to rest? And how important is it to be able to accomplish more things in the day? Aside from workaholics and college students, do you think that this research could potentially benefit certain other people?   

Read News Clip:

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112502/why-people-can-run-on-little-sleep-wsj