A recent sleep study by Michigan State University’s (MSU) Sleep and Learning Lab has uncovered a greater impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive function than thought previously. Psychology Professor Kimberly Fenn said that sleep deprivation doubles the odds of placekeeping errors and nearly triples the number of lapses in attention. Placekeeping is simply a person’s ability to follow and maintain attention through a task, despite potential interruptions, similar to a doctor completing a multi-step medical procedure.

Fenn said, “Sleep-deprived individuals need to exercise caution in absolutely everything that they do, and simply can’t trust that they won’t make costly errors which can lead to tragic consequences.”

The researchers had some 130 people to participate in an overnight sleep assessment, where 77 stayed awake all night while others went home to sleep. Participants first took two separate cognitive tasks to measure their reaction time to a stimulus and their ability to maintain their place in a series of steps; and then repeated both tasks in the morning to see how sleep-deprivation affected their performance.

MSU doctoral candidate Michelle Stepan noted a 30% spike in error rate for the sleep-deprived participants’ the following morning, but the rested participants’ morning scores were similar to the night before.

With this newfound information, Fenn hopes that people will acknowledge the potential dangers of sleep deprivation, “There are routine tasks people can do that may not be affected by a lack of sleep. However, sleep deprivation causes widespread risks across all facets of life.”

Instances of cardiac function/malfunction, such as irregular rhythms or heart failure, has been unclear in genome studies to date but researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered that genetic variations influence heart function through the binding of a protein – essentially, turning “on/off” genes involved in heart development.

After obtaining skin samples from seven people from three generations of a single family, the researchers converted the cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).  As iPSCs can replicate and also differentiate into a specialised cell types, they were directed into becoming heart cells that actually “beat” in the laboratory dish.

The genetic/molecular variation of these cells affected the protein NKX2-5, a transcription factor that must bind to non-coding regions of the genome.

Kelly A. Frazer, the Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at UCSD, explains, “NKX2-5 binds to many different places in the genome near heart genes, so it makes sense that variation in the factor itself or the DNA to which it binds would affect that function, so multiple heart-related traits can share a common mechanism – in this case, differential binding of NKX2-5 due to DNA variants.”

Since related individuals tend to share similar genetic variants, Frazer’s team was able to validate their findings by analysing the same variants in multiple samples. However, Frazer thinks there could be more genetic variants in the genome involved with NKX2 and other important cardiac transcription factors across the entire population.

Meanwhile, the team plans to further investigate cardiovascular genetics and other organ systems using this method.

“We are now expanding this same model system to look at many different transcription factors, across different tissue types, such as pancreas and retina epithelia, and scaling it up to include more families,” according to Paola Benaglio, a postdoctoral researcher in Frazer’s lab.