PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Quentin Geissmann
AU  - Esteban J. Beckwith
AU  - Giorgio F. Gilestro
TI  - Most sleep does not serve a vital function. Evidence from <em>Drosophila melanogaster</em>
AID  - 10.1101/361667
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 361667
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/04/361667.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/04/361667.full
AB  - Sleep appears to be a universally conserved phenomenon among the animal kingdom but whether this striking evolutionary conservation underlies a basic vital function is still an open question. Using novel technologies, we conducted an unprecedentedly detailed high-throughput analysis of sleep in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, coupled with a life-long chronic and specific sleep restriction. Our results show that some wild-type flies are virtually sleepless in baseline conditions and that complete, forced sleep restriction is not necessarily a lethal treatment in wild-type Drosophila melanogaster. We also show that circadian drive, and not homeostatic regulation, is the main contributor to sleep pressure in flies. We propose a three-partite model framework of sleep function, according to which, total sleep accounts for three components: a vital component, a useful component, and an accessory component.