Summary: New research is examining whether disrupted sleep accelerates biological aging by altering DNA methylation, a chemical modification of DNA that tracks age. Using the jewel wasp as a model organism, scientists will test how sleep deprivation affects markers of biological age and whether any effects can be reversed.
This project aims to determine if poor sleep directly drives changes linked to aging and to explore whether correcting sleep patterns could help preserve health and longevity.
Key Facts:
- The team will use the jewel wasp (Nasonia vitripennis), an insect that, like humans, is mainly active during the day and sleeps at night, to study how night-time sleep loss affects lifespan, healthspan, and DNA methylation patterns tied to aging.
- Sleep disruption has been associated with increased expression of genes implicated in aging and higher mortality risk in older adults; DNA methylation is one of the most reliable molecular indicators of biological age.
- The project will test whether epigenetic changes from sleep disturbance are merely correlates of aging or whether they contribute causally to biological aging, which could inform interventions to improve sleep and extend healthy years.
Source: University of Leicester
Parents of newborns often report feeling years older after months of disrupted sleep. Now researchers at the University of Leicester are investigating whether maintaining good sleep is not just restorative, but actually central to healthy aging—through changes in our DNA.
A new research programme at Leicester, funded with £164,587 from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), will establish an insect model to study how sleep disruption affects aging and whether those effects can be reversed. The focus is on DNA methylation, a chemical tag on DNA that shifts over an organism’s lifetime and closely reflects biological age.
As people grow older, sleep patterns change: total sleep time often decreases, awakenings during the night become more common, and time spent in deep sleep or REM sleep typically declines. Many epidemiological studies link disturbed sleep with worse health outcomes and greater risk of mortality in older adults. Even brief sleep disruption can alter gene expression in pathways associated with aging.
Despite these associations, the molecular mechanisms connecting sleep and aging remain unclear. One of the most robust molecular markers of age is DNA methylation—the addition of methyl groups to DNA—which shifts predictably over time and is used to build so-called epigenetic clocks that estimate biological age.
Professor Eamonn Mallon and his team in the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology at the University of Leicester have previously shown that a DNA methylation–based epigenetic clock can reliably track aging in the jewel wasp (Nasonia vitripennis). This makes the wasp a promising model to test whether changes in DNA methylation are involved in aging driven by sleep disturbance.
Biological aging has two commonly used measures: lifespan, the total length of life, and healthspan, the period of life spent in good health and activity. Working with behavioural geneticists at the University of Leicester (Dr Ko-Fan Chen) and Imperial College London (Dr Giorgio Gilestro), Professor Mallon’s group will examine how sleep loss affects both lifespan and healthspan in the wasp, and whether the epigenetic clock reflects those changes.
Because the jewel wasp sleeps primarily at night, researchers will experimentally keep wasps awake during their normal sleep period and then monitor the consequences for survival, daily activity levels (a proxy for healthspan), and DNA methylation-based age. If sleep disturbance advances the epigenetic clock or shortens healthspan, that would support a direct link between sleep quality and biological aging, and indicate a role for epigenetic mechanisms in that process.
Professor Mallon commented: “We will be seeing how active the wasps are. As they age, you would expect them to be less active, a measure of healthspan and with sleep disturbance you would expect to see this happen quicker.
“If it does, then the next step would be to see if this is reversible, with the ultimate aim being could we help people get a better night sleep as they age and maybe even live longer.
“Epigenetic clocks are also a pretty good measure of age, but what people aren’t 100% sure of is whether epigenetic age is causative of aging or just an effect of aging – a bit like molecular ‘wrinkles’.”
Investigating aging is challenging because it is driven by many environmental and genetic factors that are hard to control in humans. Model organisms have been invaluable: fruit flies and nematodes have short lifespans that make aging studies feasible, but they lack DNA methylation systems comparable to those in vertebrates and some insects.
The jewel wasp combines a short, manageable lifespan—typically about three weeks—with a functional DNA methylation system, making it a useful intermediate model for studying links between sleep, epigenetics, and aging. Professor Mallon noted: “Our lab was the first to actually show that this process exists in insects. There are a lot of interventions out there aimed at tackling aging, but the evidence for most of them is very slight. The wasp could really become a kind of early check – basically, a tiny version of us.”
About this sleep, aging, and genetics research news
Author: Peter Thorley
Source: University of Leicester
Contact: Peter Thorley – University of Leicester
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News