Night Owl or Early Bird? The Reason Might Be Genetic
Michael W. Young has been studying sleep disorders for more than 45 years. When he started his research, as a graduate student at the University of Texas in the early 1970s, the field was largely unformed. We still don’t know exactly why we sleep, but in the intervening decades we’ve learned a lot about the underlying mechanisms. For one, we now know about circadian rhythm, or the body’s internal clock, which dictates sleep-wake cycles. More specifically, we’re starting to pinpoint why this cycle often gets disrupted. By isolating the mutations responsible for changes in the circadian rhythm in flies and mice, researchers are beginning to identify corresponding genes in humans. It’s a slow and imperfect process—we’re (reassuringly) far more complex than either species—but we’re gaining a better understanding of how our genes influence our sleep. For example, Young and a team of researchers recently published a paper in Cell that links delayed sleep phase disorder to a mutation in the