What have we learned about sleep from selective breeding strategies?

Selective breeding is a classic technique that enables an experimenter to modify a heritable target trait as desired. Direct selective breeding for extreme sleep and circadian phenotypes in flies successfully alters these behaviors, and sleep and circadian perturbations emerge as correlated responses to selection for other traits in mice, rats, and dogs. The application of sequencing technologies to the process of selective breeding identifies the genetic network impacting the selected trait in a holistic way. Breeding techniques preserve the extreme phenotypes generated during selective breeding, generating community resources for further functional testing. Selective breeding is thus a unique strategy that can explore the phenotypic limits of sleep and circadian behavior, discover correlated responses of traits having shared genetic architecture with the target trait, identify naturally-occurring genomic variants and gene expression changes that affect trait variability, and pinpoint genes with conserved roles. Statement of Significance Selective breeding makes the improvement of animals and crops possible. Recent work couples this classic breeding strategy with sequencing technology to trace the genomic and gene expression changes underlying observed changes in sleep and circadian behavior. Selective breeding emerges as a comprehensive approach for the identification of genetic networks and the detection of conserved genomic variants for sleep.

Automated summary

Selective breeding is a unique strategy that explores the phenotypic limits of sleep and circadian behavior, discovers correlated traits, identifies genetic variants and gene expression changes that affect trait variability, and pinpoints genes with conserved roles.