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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		How a family is providing researchers with valuable information about sleep & depression
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:00
	Publish Date:		2016-04-26 00:00:00
	Description:		Studies on a family with a rare sleep disorder have strengthened the genetic tie between sleep and depression. The family carried the condition known as Familial Advanced Sleep Phase, or FASP. Researcher Louis Ptacek of the University of California, San Francisco says FASP causes people to chronically fall asleep and wake up early. "We began this work focused exclusively on the circadian phenotype, the morning lark, or FASP phenotype." But three members of the family with FASP also had seasonal affective disorder, and carried a gene mutation that appeared to link their depression to their sleep schedules. "For all the work in drosophila and fungi and mice, what we understand about circadian clock genetics is not accounting for even one half of FASP. So, these families then provide a huge resource for identifying novel clock genes."
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