The importance of sleep is very well known, yet how it exactly works is less understood. Our research group aims to understand more about sleep's genetic machinery by studying how a much simpler organism sleeps: a nematode known as Caenorhabditis elegans. These roundworms are only 1mm long but they share a lot of genetic analogues to humans, making them an easy and ideal model organism! Previous research in the lab has created a few mutagenized lines of worms that do not feel the need to sleep, despite being fatigued and exposed to illness/stress. Our lab aims to verify the phenotype of these worms and, if the results are replicable and robust, analyze the genotype of these mutagenized worms to discover which genetic pathways are being disrupted that produces such behavior. We hope that these worms will help us gleam a better understanding of the specific genetic pathways that go into regulating stress-induced fatigue. We believe that such research can help elucidate more information on sleep disorders like insomnia, as well as illness driven sleep such as fatigue from illnesses like Covid-19.  

My research project this summer was to test the robustness of the phenotype of these mutagenized worms. Are they actually the real deal? Since biological research, particularly when trying to discover new behavioral phenotypes, can be subject to quite a large amount of variance and noise, stress-testing these phenotypes requires a lot of replicated experiments. We utilized metrics such as worm speed, motivation to find food, and average time spent sleeping to make sure that these worms truly did have a reduced sleeping profile. We did this both manually and by utilizing automated tracking programs to help separate the mutagenized lines that have promise of revealing a tangible genetic result once the sequencing portion of the experiment begins.