Friday 14 August 2009

It isn't that you are tired, it is because you are genetically weak.

A mutation in the transcription repressor DEC2 has been shown in human and mouse to influence the total amount of daily sleep time required. Reported in Science.

It isn't well reported in terms of the actual genome location but using EnsEMBL annotation, I traced the variant (on hg19) to chromosome 12, base 26276297. As reported, it is a C->G (proline to arginine). It isn't typed on the Affy 6.0 or Illumina 1M chip. There is nothing I could see on frequency in the general population, but USAToday reports it is 3% (reference). There is also no dbSNP annotation at this location, but it is a well conserved residue. And there was no information on Watson or Venter phenotypes in Ensembl 55.

Looks like your hope for being some sort of sleep-impervious super human are small.

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