Even Worms Need Their Beauty Rest.

• Position: CAENORHABDITIS ELEGANS

Elephants, cats, flies, and even worms sleep. It is a natural part of most animals' lives. Research from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, takes a deeper look at sleep in the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, finding three chemicals that collectively work together to induce sleep. The study also shows that these chemicals--small proteins called neuropeptides that regulate neural activity--each control a different sleep behavior, such as the suppression of feeding or movement.

The results suggest that other organisms, perhaps even humans, might similarly regulate individual components of sleep. "The idea that multiple peptides work together to control sleep and its individual behaviors may translate to other animals," says Paul Sternberg, professor of biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

"C. elegans is a simple animal model that allows us to isolate key molecular pathways. We start there and the information trickles up to other animal models."

3. elegans, which is about the size of the comma in this sentence, can be induced to sleep by certain stressors, such as heat. Researchers have used this behavior to get at the root of what regulates the worm's sleep. The transparent organisms, which live for only a few weeks, easily can be observed through microscopes.

In 2007, a former Caltech postdoc, Cheryl Van

Buskirk, now a professor in the Department of Biology at California State University, Northridge, discovered that one cell alone, known as the ALA neuron, is responsible for inducing sleep in C. elegans; if you...