Messy Memories

Your teachers told you not to cram all night for exams because sleep is crucial for memory. But a new study has found that fruit flies that sleep very little due to a genetic mutation called insomniac surprisingly showed better memory than normal flies. This anomaly was linked to higher activity of a signalling molecule, protein kinase A, in part of the fly brain called the mushroom body. The researchers found that neurons in the mushroom body (pictured) grew abnormally in mutants (centre) compared to normal (left). Reducing protein kinase A levels in mutants did restore some normal sleep behaviour, but even further muddled the neurons (right), and appeared to boost memory further, perhaps linked to the overstimulated growth of connections. Lack of sleep takes a vast physiological toll, so using this system to understand the balance of sleep, memory, and neurological circuitry could inform research from insomnia to Alzheimer’s disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Sheng Huang & Chengji Piao, and colleagues
• Institute for Biology/Genetics, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, March 2025