Julie Williams
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
When we are sick with an infection, an autoimmune disease or cancer, we tend to feel sleepy and sleep more, yet the sleep is often unrefreshing. Fruit flies (Drosophila) show the same kind of sickness behavior after bacterial infection or injury, becoming less active and sleeping more.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Genetics
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
sleep
sickness behavior
Drosophila
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Test whether NFκB transcription factors drive production of nemuri, a brain-expressed antimicrobial peptide that promotes sleep, during infection and sleep deprivation in Drosophila.
- Determine whether prolonged nemuri expression, caused genetically, by chronic sleep loss or by infection, induces lipid bilayer stress in flies, using lipidomic and biochemical approaches.
- Test whether prolonged nemuri suppresses NFκB signaling and blunts the IRE1/XBP1 unfolded protein response to lipid stress, thereby increasing sleep need, using behavioral genetics and pharmacology.
More about the research
Why sickness changes sleep is unknown, but the immune system and fat (lipid) balance are both implicated. Flies are a powerful genetic model for asking how these systems control sleep.
Why it matters
Fatigue and unrefreshing sleep accompany many human illnesses, including chronic fatigue syndrome. Because the immune, lipid and stress-response pathways studied here are highly conserved between flies and mammals, this work could provide a framework for understanding why sickness causes excess sleep. It may eventually inform approaches to illness-associated fatigue.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ravi Allada
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience
Map sleep- and wake-dependent changes in gene activity in the Drosophila brain at single-cell resolution, using single-cell RNA sequencing to find the cells and genes that track sleep need.
Yuan Yuan Kang
University of Houston-Downtown, TX·Neuroscience
Map quantitative trait loci behind the difference in novel-arena exploration between generalist Drosophila simulans and specialist Drosophila sechellia, using a new population of recombinant inbred lines.
Steven Boeynaems
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Neuroscience·Early-career
Define the biophysical rules by which neuropathological proteins form condensates with nucleic acids that mimic antimicrobial peptides and boost Toll-like receptor immune signaling, using in vitro biophysical approaches.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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