Natural selection on sleep duration in Drosophila melanogaster

Sleep duration varies genetically among individuals and across species. We previously demonstrated that very long and short sleep times in flies could be bred for experimentally using artificial selection. We accomplished that by breeding for long and short sleep times for 13 generations in two replicate populations of long sleepers and two replicate populations of short sleepers. Here our goal was to determine whether a signal of natural selection on sleep could be detected by relaxing the artificial selection constraints in the populations bred for extreme long and short sleep. We relaxed selection constraints for 62 generations and sequenced the genomes of each population at generation 75 (13 generations of artificial selection followed by 62 generations of relaxed selection). We also sequenced two unselected control populations at generation 75. In addition, we sequenced the original outbred advanced intercross population used to start the experiment when at 102 generations after the experiment began.