Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chronobiology Program, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Science. 2019 Feb 1;363(6426):509-515. doi: 10.1126/science.aat1650.
Sleep remains a major mystery of biology. In particular, little is known about the mechanisms that account for the drive to sleep. In an unbiased screen of more than 12,000 lines, we identified a single gene, , that induces sleep. The NEMURI protein is an antimicrobial peptide that can be secreted ectopically to drive prolonged sleep (with resistance to arousal) and to promote survival after infection. Loss of increased arousability during daily sleep and attenuated the acute increase in sleep induced by sleep deprivation or bacterial infection. Conditions that increase sleep drive induced expression of in a small number of fly brain neurons and targeted it to the sleep-promoting, dorsal fan-shaped body. We propose that NEMURI is a bona fide sleep homeostasis factor that is particularly important under conditions of high sleep need; because these conditions include sickness, our findings provide a link between sleep and immune function.
睡眠仍然是生物学的一个主要未解之谜。特别是，对于导致睡眠的机制知之甚少。在对超过 12000 个品系的无偏筛选中，我们鉴定出一个单一基因 ，它能诱导睡眠。NEMURI 蛋白是一种抗菌肽，可以异位分泌以驱动长时间睡眠（对唤醒有抵抗力）并促进感染后的存活。缺失 会增加日常睡眠中的唤醒能力，并减弱睡眠剥夺或细菌感染引起的急性睡眠增加。增加睡眠驱动的条件会在少数果蝇脑神经元中诱导 表达，并将其靶向到促进睡眠的背部扇形体。我们提出 NEMURI 是一种真正的睡眠稳态因子，在高睡眠需求的情况下尤其重要；由于这些情况包括疾病，我们的发现为睡眠和免疫功能之间提供了联系。
