Fruit-Fly Is a Surprising Model to Cure Sleep Problem

Jun, 2021 - By WMR

An advanced study has been made by the Dutch-American research team, to enumerate the exact underlying mechanism of the above mentioned problem.

Maintenance of the health in proper condition is heavily linked with a sound sleep as it is important to have a proper diet and exercising as well. Poor sleep condition is linked with several problems like increase in the body weight, also increases the chance of stroke and other heart diseases, can also increase the chance of type 2 diabetes, depression and other neural problems. It is seen commonly that the patients suffering from either autism or intellectual disability, sleep function is highly perturbed.

Drosophila melanogaster, also commonly known as “Fruit-Fly”, is a common model organism in case of both modern and classical genetics. Its usage as a genetic model, has got a lot of advantages, like small size of the genome thereby easy to manipulate properly. However, many of the genes of Drosophila share a common ancestry with human genes that are associated with several type of diseases and cancers as well. Thus investigating with drosophila will be relatively easy with no ethical issues being involved.

Disturbed sleep in case of Autistic patients, generally refers to the high concentration of serotonin and also because of the glial cells, present at the blood brain barrier. Astonishingly, “Fruit-Fly” also exhibit a similar molecular mimicking mechanism, in them as well.

Sleep problem is also associated with mutation in the gene CHD8 in case of Autism, or in an isomeric CHD7 gene, which might give rise another problem called as CHARGE syndrome. By inducing these mutations in a healthy fruit fly, nervous system altercations in the model organism has been observed. They found the substantiation of the glial cells in the Fragmentation of sleep in Drosophila as well. Hyperserotonemia is also found in case of the Fruit-Fly leading to sleep fragmentation.

Molecular mimicking mechanism found in the fruit fly is actually helpful for the scientists, to find an exact genetic target area and other therapeutic implications, thereby a fully functional model to deal with the problem.