Sleep Maintains Innate Immune Competence

Sleep is a highly conserved behaviour that is essential for organismal health. Although evidence links sleep loss to increased susceptibility to disease, the mechanisms by which sleep regulates innate immunity remain poorly understood. Innate immunity is the evolutionarily conserved branch of the immune system shared by insects and vertebrates, making Drosophila melanogaster an ideal model to investigate these interactions. We study how chronic sleep restriction affects the ability of the host to respond to systemic bacterial infections. To this end, we employ an automated sleep monitoring and restriction system that selectively disrupts sleep while allowing flies to undergo chronic sleep restriction for up to 10 days without compromising survival. Following sleep restriction, flies are challenged with systemic bacterial infections, and host survival, bacterial load, and molecular markers of the innate immune response are assessed to determine how sleep influences immune resistance and disease tolerance. Future work will combine genetic tools with gene expression analyses to identify immune pathways and physiological processes that depend on sleep. By uncovering the mechanisms through which sleep modulates innate immunity, this project aims to establish conserved principles linking behaviour to host defence and provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how chronic sleep loss impairs immune competence across animal species.