Behind all this is the astonishing, baffling breadth of what sleep does for the body. The fact that learning, metabolism, memory, and myriad other functions and systems are affected makes an alteration as basic as the presence of ROS quite interesting. But even if ROS is behind the lethality of sleep loss, there is no evidence yet that sleep’s cognitive effects, for instance, come from the same source. And even if antioxidants prevent premature death in flies, they may not affect sleep’s other functions, or if they do, it may be for different reasons.
The flies that never sleep and their glowing guts remind us that sleep is profoundly a full-body experience, not merely a function of the mind and brain. In their deaths may lie some answers as to why sleeplessness kills and — potentially, tantalizingly — what sleep does to link disparate systems throughout the body. Shaw, for one, is interested to see what happens next in Rogulja’s lab. “It’s a super important question,” he said, “and they’ve come up with a way to address it.
Giancarlo Angulo's Blog