Scientists make progress in decoding genetics of insomnia tamu ScienceAdvances
Texas A&M geneticist and evolutionary biologist Alex Keene collaborated with Penn's Allan Pack and Philip Gehrman and CHOP's Struan Grant on the groundbreaking research, which is published in," Keene said."Some studies have hundreds of thousands of individuals. But validation and testing in animal models is critical to understanding function.
Keene says the most exciting thing about the team's work is that they developed a pipeline starting not with a"There is an abundance of human genome-wide association studies that identify genetic variants associated with sleep in humans," Keene said."However, validating them has been an enormous challenge. Our team used a genomics approach called variant-to-gene mapping to predict the genes impacted by each genetic variant.
Keene says the team's next step is to study the role of a common protein modification, GPI-anchor biosynthesis, on sleep regulation. In addition, he notes that the human-to-fruit flies-to-zebrafish pipeline the team developed will allow them to functionally assess not only sleep genes but also other traits commonly studied using human GWAS, including neurodegeneration, aging and memory.
"Understanding how genes regulate sleep and the role of this pathway in sleep regulation can help unlock future findings on sleep and sleep disorders, such as insomnia," said Gehrman, an associate professor of clinical psychology in psychiatry at Penn and awith the Penn Chronobiology and Sleep Institute."Moving forward, we will continue to use and study this system to identify more genes regulating sleep, which could point in the direction of new treatments for sleep disorders.
Keene's research within his Center for Biological Clocks Research-affiliated laboratory lies at the intersection of evolution and neuroscience, with primary focus on understanding the neural mechanisms and evolutionary underpinnings of sleep, memory formation and other behavioral functions in fly and fish models.
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