Abstract
Sleep disturbances negatively impact numerous functions and have been linked to aggression and violence. However, a clear effect of sleep deprivation on aggressive behaviors remains unclear. We find that acute sleep deprivation profoundly suppresses aggressive behaviors in the fruit fly, while other social behaviors are unaffected. This suppression is recovered following post-deprivation sleep rebound, and occurs regardless of the approach to achieve sleep loss. Genetic and pharmacologic approaches suggest octopamine signaling transmits changes in aggression upon sleep deprivation, and reduced aggression places sleep-deprived flies at a competitive disadvantage for obtaining a reproductive partner. These findings demonstrate an interaction between two phylogenetically conserved behaviors, and suggest that previous sleep experiences strongly modulate aggression with consequences for reproductive fitness.
Highlights
Insufficient sleep impairs a wide range of essential processes such as cognition, alertness, metabolic activity, and immune function (Foster and Wulff, 2005)
To test how sleep deprivation affects aggressive behaviors in Drosophila, we focused on 4–7 day old Canton-S (CS) males in social isolation since shortly after eclosion
Flies were acutely sleep deprived for 12 hr overnight using mechanical stimulation, and aggression assays were performed the following morning, either by pairing flies within the same condition or pairing one control fly with a sleepdeprived fly (‘between conditions’, for which males of each condition were tracked with a small dot of Neuroscience paint on the thorax)
Summary
Insufficient sleep impairs a wide range of essential processes such as cognition, alertness, metabolic activity, and immune function (Foster and Wulff, 2005). Learning more about the neuronal circuits that control sleep and social behavior in fruit flies may lead to an improved understanding of these phenomena in humans and, in the longer term, the development of drugs that can influence or modulate aggressive behaviors. Neurons projecting to the dorsal fan-shaped body control sleep (Ueno et al, 2012; Wu et al, 2012), and a number of distinct clusters modulate aggression, including PPM3 and T1 neurons (Alekseyenko et al, 2013) Both of these signaling systems would be well positioned to integrate information regarding internal state and environmental demand to optimize behavioral output at a given time. We demonstrate that sleep deprived flies are at a disadvantage for reproductive success when competing against flies whose sleep has been unperturbed
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