A mathematical model describes Drosophila sleep behavior in w1118 controls and in a hyposomnolent insomniac line

School of Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States of America
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1408v1
Subject Areas
Animal Behavior, Entomology, Mathematical Biology, Statistics
Keywords
sleep, activity, Drosophila, waking, nonlinear regression, architecture, consolidation, least-squares, insomniac, homeostasis
Copyright
© 2015 Diamond
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Diamond JM. 2015. A mathematical model describes Drosophila sleep behavior in w1118 controls and in a hyposomnolent insomniac line. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1408v1

Abstract

The conserved nature of sleep in Drosophila has allowed the fruit fly to emerge in the last decade as a powerful model organism in which to study sleep. Recent sleep studies in Drosophila have focused on the discovery and characterization of hyposomnolent mutants. One common feature of these animals is a change in sleep architecture: sleep bout count tends to be greater, and sleep bout length lower, in hyposomnolent mutants. I propose a mathematical model, produced by least-squares nonlinear regression to fit the form Y = aX^b, which can explain sleep behavior in the healthy animal as well as previously-reported changes in total sleep and sleep architecture in hyposomnolent mutants. This model, fit to sleep data, yields coefficient of determination R squared, which describes goodness of fit. R squared is lower in hyposomnolent mutant insomniac as compared to control, indicating a poorer fit of the model to the data in insomniac. R squared also tends to be lower in daytime sleep as compared to nighttime sleep. My findings raise the possibility that low R squared is a feature of all hyposomnolent mutants, not just insomniac. If this were the case, R squared could emerge as a novel means by which sleep researchers might assess sleep dysfunction.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

Raw data describing control and insomniac sleep behavior

Control behavior is shown in rows 18-49. Insomniac behavior is shown in rows 56 to 88. The rest of this chart should be self-explanatory, as all columns are labelled. ZT/CT0-12 refers to daytime; ZT/CT12-24 refers to nighttime.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.1408v1/supp-1