Data from: Experimentally induced active and quiet sleep engage non-overlapping transcriptional programs in Drosophila

Sleep in mammals can be broadly classified into two different
physiological categories: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and slow wave
sleep (SWS), and accordingly REM and SWS are thought to achieve a
different set of functions. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is
increasingly being used as a model to understand sleep functions, although
it remains unclear if the fly brain also engages in different kinds of
sleep as well. Here, we compare two commonly used approaches for studying
sleep experimentally in Drosophila: optogenetic activation of
sleep-promoting neurons and provision of a sleep-promoting drug,
Gaboxadol. We find that these different sleep-induction methods have
similar effects on increasing sleep duration, but divergent effects on
brain activity. Transcriptomic analysis reveals that drug-induced deep
sleep (‘quiet’ sleep) mostly downregulates metabolism genes, whereas
optogenetic ‘active’ sleep upregulates a wide range of genes relevant to
normal waking functions. This suggests that optogenetics and
pharmacological induction of sleep in Drosophila promote different
features of sleep, which engage different sets of genes to achieve their
respective functions.