Scientists Made a New Breakthrough in the Genetics of Sleep

For most people, sleeping for just four hours every night is likely to have adverse effects on their health. Signs of not getting enough sleep include depression and moodiness, along with the possibility of gaining weight. But for a very small group of people, four hours of sleep per night is perfectly adequate to keep their bodies and minds functioning properly. The term to describe this phenomenon is “natural short sleepers,” and scientists have discovered several genes that can result in it.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America provided more detail about another mutation, known as SIK3-N783Y. The paper’s authors both located this genetic mutation in a human subject and were able to replicate it in mice, which they noticed “[demonstrated] reduced sleep duration.”

The scientists also noted that their findings could play a role in “potential therapeutic strategies to enhance sleep efficiency.”

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University of California San Francisco genetecist Ying-Hui Fu, one of the paper’s authors, told Nature‘s Freda Kreier that she has been working with short sleepers for over a decade. “These people, all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can,” she told Nature.

Now that this research has been published, it remains to be seen where Fu and her fellow scientists’ research will lead them next. Nature‘s reporting points out that they have found a total of five genetic mutations so far that relate to sleep; what they might learn from there could improve what we know about sleep’s effects on the body — and why getting a certain amount of it each night is so important.