Artificial selection for long and short sleep duration in Drosophila melanogaster

Sleep duration has an underlying genetic basis, suggesting that very long and short sleep times could be bred for experimentally. Our goal was to produce populations of flies with long and short night sleep duration by subjecting a wild-derived population of flies to an experimental breeding program. We sequenced the genomes of each population across seven generations of the experimental breeding to identify allele frequencies that diverged between long and short sleepers. We also sequenced the transcriptome of each population across 13 generations.