Flies sense the world while sleeping

Li, Wanhe; Keene, Alex C.

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02441-6

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29 September 2021

Flies sense the world while sleeping

High-throughput analyses of how sleeping fruit flies respond to a variety of odours show that the brains of these insects continue to process the value of the signals conveyed by sensory information during sleep.

Wanhe Li⁰ &
Alex C. Keene¹

Wanhe Li
1. Wanhe Li is at the Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10065, USA.
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Alex C. Keene
1. Alex C. Keene is in the Department of Biology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
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Sleep is a complex behaviour nearly ubiquitous among animal species¹^,². Many animals, including humans, are less responsive to sensory stimuli during sleep than when they are awake. However, human sleep is unlikely to involve a complete loss of consciousness, because people respond to salient stimuli — such as the sound of names³ or a baby crying — during sleep, while filtering out more-trivial sensory cues. But whether other animals can evaluate the importance or value signalled by different sensory stimuli during sleep is not clear. Writing in Nature, French et al.⁴ show that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster also actively processes sensory information during sleep, and that the salience of different sensory stimuli can be affected by whether it is fed or starved.

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Nature 598, 423-424 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02441-6

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