Study delves into sleep deprivation, role of gut

A study looked at prolonged sleep deprivation and the gut's role in fruit flies, according to the Havard Gazette.

Harvard Medical School neuroscientists found a link between sleep deprivation and premature death by looking at sleep-deprived fruit flies, the news agency reported. The death of the fruit files always came after an accumulation of molecules called reactive oxidative species (ROS) in the gut.

“We took an unbiased approach and searched throughout the body for indicators of damage from sleep deprivation," Dragana Rogulja, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the Blavatnik Institute of Harvard Medical School, told the Harvard Gazette. "We were surprised to find it was the gut that plays a key role in causing death."

Rogulja told the news agency they also found the premature deaths could be prevented.

"Each morning, we would all gather around to look at the flies, with disbelief to be honest," Rogulja told the Harvard Gazette. "What we saw is that every time we could neutralize ROS in the gut, we could rescue the flies."

The study found that under certain circumstances, it may be possible for animals to survive without sleep and it opened new pathways to study sleep and ways to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation on humans.

Alexandra Vaccaro and Yosef Kaplan Dor, the co-first authors of the study, monitored sleep using infrared beams to track the fruit flies' movements at all times. The flies themselves were housed in individual tubes. They found that you could shake the tubes and the flies could remain asleep, but they could manipulate the fruit flies to express a heat-sensitive protein in specific neurons, the flies would remain awake.

The flies' mortality increased after approximately 10 days and all of the fruit flies died by day 20, while fruit flies that had normal sleep lived approximately 40 days.

“We still don’t know why sleep loss causes ROS accumulation in the gut and why this is lethal,” Kaplan Dor told the Harvard Gazette. “Sleep deprivation could directly affect the gut, but the trigger may also originate in the brain. Similarly, death could be due to damage in the gut or because high levels of ROS have systemic effects, or some combination of these."