What is sleep?

Sleep is a perplexing behavior that, on the surface, seems to defy logic. Why would an animal choose to spend hours inactive, unable to hunt, mate, or defend itself from predators? The answer is that sleep must provide tremendous evolutionary benefits. Following periods of sleep deprivation, the need for sleep takes precedence over all other survival critical activities. In essence, without adequate sleep, there can be no successful transmission of genes to future generations.

There is a long history of studying sleep in mammals, however flies have been shown to sleep relatively recently (i.e. 20 years ago). Unlike mammals where sleep states (i.e. REM and NREM) are well defined by characteristic activity in Electroencelography (EEG), it has been challenging to define electrophysiological signatures of sleep in the fly brain. Furthermore, sleep is a behavior defined by 5 minutes of immobility in flies, making it hard to separate sleep from wakeful quiescence.

My research aims to characterize fly sleep at an unprecedented level at both behavioral and physiological levels. By combining high-resolution behavioral recordings with cutting-edge machine learning techniques, I aim to uncover the unique behaviors that emerge during sleep. I complement this behavioral characterization with muscle and brain imaging to pinpoint underlying physiological changes during sleep. My future goal is to leverage this characterization to further dissect molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms of sleep regulation and investigate the function of sleep.