But understanding how that pathway works could help everyone. The mutation is rare only one in 4 million people has it. People with the mutation appear to be doing that cleaning much more efficiently. Cerebrospinal fluid washes over the brain during sleep, cleaning out waste products like beta-amyloid, a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer’s that is created by normal brain activity. If you think of the body as a machine, sleep is the after-hours maintenance. But we don’t know yet.”įu suspects this mutation helps people sleep more efficiently. “It’s just one system that contributes to sleep modulation,” he says. But he says this gene discovery isn’t the key to the whole sleep mystery. His work showed that the receptor plays a role in anxiety and increased wakefulness, so he isn’t surprised to see that it might be involved in sleep regulation too. “I didn’t expect that a mutation in the receptor would be so dramatic in humans,” says Luis de Lecea, a biologist at Stanford who first identified the receptor in 2004. But when the mutant mice were placed in the same room, they did remember and moved hesitantly. Typically, sleep-deprived mice won’t remember the shocks the next day and will walk blithely across the room. To test this, the researchers subjected the mice to random electric shocks in a certain room.

In particular, their memory appeared intact. More revealing, perhaps, is the fact that the mice also behaved normally, just like the father and son. But each new gene discovery helps elucidate how these interrelated pathways control our 40 winks. “We don’t know how these different genes converge together to regulate sleep,” says Fu. It’s only the third short-sleep mutation found so far, though Fu and other scientists suspect there are several more. The mutation is helping scientists understand how our bodies regulate sleep. Using those samples, Fu and Ptáček have now identified a new gene mutation associated with short sleepers, which they describe in a paper out today in Science Translational Medicine. Fu’s lab interviewed the pair, enrolled them in a study, and took samples of their blood. They weren’t cranky or forgetful like most sleep-deprived people would be.

But the two were happy, energetic, and healthy. One man described how he only slept about five and a half hours each night. Now, it seemed, the entirety of the short-sleeping universe was deluging her inbox. Fu and her colleague and spouse Louis Ptáček, both at the University of California, San Francisco, had just identified a gene mutation that significantly decreased how many hours someone needs to sleep. In 2009, Ying-Hui Fu started getting a flood of emails from people who claimed to only need a few hours of sleep at night.

People who dont sleep