Abstract
Drosophila has proven to be a powerful model to identify genes and circuits that impact sleep. While the majority of studies have primarily been interested in identifying manipulations that alter sleep time, a growing body of work has begun to focus on how changing sleep influences functional outcomes such as cognitive performance, structural plasticity, and metabolism to name a few. Evaluating sleep time provides an appropriate entry point into elucidating sleep function. However, it is not possible to fully understand how a manipulation has impacted sleep regulation without first establishing how it has affected the animals’ well-being. Synaptic plasticity and memory are important functional outcomes that can be used to asses an animal’s status. In this manuscript, we review recent advances in studies examining sleep, memory, and performance. We conclude that as Drosophila sleep researchers expand their analysis beyond sleep time, the opportunities to discover the function of sleep will be enhanced.
Highlights
Sleep was first described in Drosophila by two independent groups ~14 years ago [1, 2]
Some of the work has focused on synaptic plasticity [9, 23,24,25, 27], while other studies have examined learning and memory [17, 21, 43] or metabolism [17, 19, 49, 50]
As a suggestion on how we, as a field, might proceed, we provide a flow chart in Fig. 2 that describes a systematic approach that can help place the outcome of sleep time is an insufficient metric to describe the effect of sleep manipulation on an animal’s physiology, and we propose that a minimum of three assessments be made to characterize each manipulation
Summary
Sleep was first described in Drosophila by two independent groups ~14 years ago [1, 2]. Given the well-known relationship between sleep and learning/memory in humans, we favor using cognitive performance as a way to further assess the consequences of genetic manipulations on sleep. Few studies have evaluated memory in short-sleeping flies.
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