Caltech biologists have performed the first large-scale screening in a vertebrate animal for genes that regulate sleep, and have identified a gene that when overactivated causes severe insomnia. Expression of the gene, neuromedin U (Nmu), also seems to serve as nature's stimulant--fish lacking the gene take longer to wake up in the morning and are less active during the day.

The findings improve our understanding of how sleep is regulated--a process that we know surprisingly little about despite its clear importance. In the long term, the results suggest Nmu as a potential candidate for new therapies to address sleep disorders.

A paper describing the new screening process and its results appears in the February 17, 2016, issue of the journal Neuron. David Prober, assistant professor of biology at Caltech, began the work as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and has continued the work at Caltech since 2009. The lead authors on the paper are Cindy Chiu (PhD '14), a former graduate student in Prober's lab, and Jason Rihel, who collaborated with Prober at Harvard and now has his own lab at University College London.

"Sleep is a mysterious process," says Prober. "We spend a third of our lives doing it, and every animal with a complex nervous system seems to do it, so it must be important. But we still don't understand why we do it or how it's regulated."

Genetic screens are a powerful method that can help identify the genetic basis of such behaviors. They typically involve mutating the DNA of thousands of animals, raising them, identifying any resulting physical or behavioral differences, and determining which altered gene produced each mutation. This approach works well for simple model organisms, such as fruit flies and worms, because their anatomy is relatively simple and it is easy to raise large numbers of them, but is far more difficult in vertebrates, such as rodents.

However, scientists still do not know which are the relevant ones for causing sleep disorders in humans. "Our study suggests that Nmu could be a good gene to look into."