A Conserved Role for in Sleep Architecture

Previous studies of natural variants in implicated the Wnt signaling receptor in sleep. Given that the Wnt signaling pathway is highly conserved across species, we hypothesized that (), the murine homolog of , would also have a role in sleep. Using a CRISPR transgenic approach, we removed most of the coding region from C57BL/6N mice. We used a video assay to measure sleep characteristics in -deficient mice. As signaling is known to affect visuospatial memory, we also examined the impact of the deletion on learning and memory using the novel object recognition (NOR) paradigm. -deficient mice had altered sleep compared to littermate controls. The mice did not respond differently to the NOR paradigm compared to controls but did display anxiety-like behavior. Our strategy demonstrates that the study of natural variation in sleep translates into candidate genes for sleep in vertebrate species such as the mouse.