Better Sleep with Minimal Hours? ADRB1 Gene Suspected

  Sleep. Too much or not enough may cause the rest of your day to either be miserable and/or not as productive as desired. For Brad Johnson and many of his family members, this is not an issue. They have the ability to run on less than 8 hours of sleep consistently without drawbacks. How? Well, this is due to them having a mutated gene named ADRB1 (Figure 1A depicts a pedigree of an affected family) which directly determines the amount of sleep people need (other genes may also play a role in this as well). The people who have this gene (or are heterozygotes) are labeled as “natural short sleepers” and it only shows up in around 1 in every 25,000 people.

  Having the ability to do more and sleep less would be a fairly ideal situation. If utilized to its fullest extent (especially if you'd need only a couple hours of sleep), much could get done before the day has even begun. It would also be assumable that this would have a negative effect on affected persons. Yet, from what was shown in the article, Brad Johnson has been living a fulfilling life, participating in multiple hobbies and had a good career (in which he is now retired). Even the researchers, Dr. Fu and Dr. Ptacek, have stated that natural short sleepers are both optimistic and resilient. It may be early in this research, but this may open up a lot of new doors in understanding sleep in humans.

Links:

-         -  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/sleep-gene.html

-        -  https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30652-X

Sleep is as Easy as ABCC9

The gene ABCC9 has been found to be linked to sleep patterns in humans. A study was conducted by LMU in seven European countries that correlated subjects’ sleep patterns to their genomes. On average, people who  one version of ABCC9 needed significantly less sleep than those who had a different version of ABCC9. This gene may explain why some people need more sleep than others. For example, Napoleon was said to have only needed four hours of sleep whereas Einstein needed eleven hours of sleep a night. The ABCC9 gene codes for a protein (SUR2) which regulates the potassium channel in the cell membrane. The ion channel senses the energy metabolism in the cell. If one variation of the gene was better at assessing how much energy the body needed, it could cause the body to sleep longer to recharge that energy lost.

Experiments were done on fruit flies to test the effect of ABCC9 on their sleep patterns. Scientists from Leicester University blocked ABCC9 from working in the nervous system of the fruit flies, and their sleep cycle was shortened as a result. ABCC9 also is involved in a variety of tissues in the body like the pancreas, skeletal muscles, heart, and the brain. If scientists could understand the connection between the genetic influences of sleep duration and health, they could use that information to try and improve overall health by improving sleep.

This is a summary of an article from Science Daily titled, "The ABCC9 of Sleep: A Genetic Factor Regulates How Long We Sleep."