Mechanisms for emergence of rhythmic behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster

2024 Bridge to Success Grant for Early Career Investigators

AMY POE, PHD
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Key Project Outcomes

As any new parent knows, newborn infants do not sleep in a consolidated fashion during the night. Instead, newborns sleep and feed intermittently across the day and night with consolidated sleep patterns not emerging until 3-12 months postnatally. Interestingly, these rapid transitions between different behavioral states in young animals occur in the presence of a functional internal time-keeping mechanism (central circadian clock), suggesting that rhythmic behaviors do not initially receive circadian input. Understanding how rhythmic behaviors develop is essential, as circadian disruptions are a common co-morbidity in many neurodevelopmental disorders. However, little is known about the genetic mechanisms regulating the development of rhythmic behaviors. The proposed research utilized the powerful genetic model system, Drosophila, to examine how sleep-wake rhythms develop and how early life circadian-sleep circuits influence sleep across the lifespan. Specifically, we found that sleep-regulatory circuits present early in life also modulate adult sleep timing and sleep duration. Additionally, we determined that clock-arousal circuit formation is nutritionally plastic, suggesting that circuit development is influenced by environmental and metabolic conditions.