Sleep to Repair

Every animal possessing a nervous system – from anemones to zebras – requires some form of sleep. And this universality implies sleep’s critical function for maintaining healthy neurons. By studying the nervous systems of a variety of animals, including the sea anemone, which has a simple neural net (pictured) but no brain, scientists now know that wakefulness is associated with DNA damage accumulation in neurons and that sleep enables its repair. When sea anemones were forced to stay awake for longer than usual, their neurons accumulated more damage and they needed more recovery sleep. Of course, DNA damage can be problematic for any cell, but the fact that neurons are, largely speaking, non-dividing and irreplaceable might explain why repairs in these cells are particularly crucial. With all that in mind, if you happen to be reading this late at night, you know what to do, don’t you.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Dr. Raphaël Aguillon, from work by Raphaël Aguillon & Amir Harduf, and colleagues
• Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
• Image originally published with no restrictions –  here as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Nature Communications, January 2026