A Wake-Up Call for Dozing Drosophila

How long does a fruit fly sleep? That depends on its genetic make-up, according to research presented this weekend at a meeting of the Genetics Society of America in Boston, Massachusetts.Researchers identified nearly 1,000 genes in which certain single-letter changes in DNA, called SNPs (for single nucleotide polymorphisms), are associated with the length of sleep.This preliminary study is the first to come out of the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel project, a catalogue of variations across the complete genomes of 192 inbred lines of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.Read more at...Nature, June 2010.