Donlea Laboratory

Sleep is universally conserved across animal species, and continuous sleep loss can kill as rapidly as starvation. The basic functions of sleep, however, are not known. Sleep loss harms systems throughout the body, but the brain is especially sensitive to prolonged waking, and cognitive deficits are among the first consequences of sleep loss. Because the only way to recover from these deficits is to regain lost sleep, sleep must benefit the brain. We are unable to directly examine the molecular functions of sleep in the human brain, but because the consequences of sleep loss are shared between humans and smaller model systems, such as the fruit fly, it is likely that the basic functions of sleep have also been shared across evolution. The simplicity of the fly, along with the wide array of available genetic tools, provide an optimal model to study sleep function and regulation.