My Genes Are Too Short

So, I am a night owl...always have been. My dad is a night owl, my uncles are night owls, my brother is a night owl. The 9-5 world is not conducive to my ability to function.

Well, a couple of British researchers may have shed a bit of light on the issue. See story from a recent edition of the Economist below. Interesting....very interesting....

How well you can think at night may be determined by your genes

"THE idea that people might be chosen or rejected for jobs on the basis of their genes disturbs many. Such discrimination may, however, be a step closer, thanks to work just published in Current Biology by Derk-Jan Dijk and his colleagues at the University of Surrey, in England.

Dr Dijk studies the biology of time-keeping—in particular of the part of the internal body-clock that sends people to sleep and wakes them up. One of the genes involved in regulating this clock is known as PER3 and comes in two forms. Dr Dijk's work suggests that one of these forms is more conducive to night-shift work than the other.

The two forms of PER3 translate into two slightly different proteins, one of which is longer than the other. Previous work by this group showed that people with two short versions of the gene (one from each parent) are more likely to be “owls”, preferring to get up late and go to bed late. “Larks”—in other words, early risers, have two long versions.

Pursuing this line of enquiry, Dr Dijk and his team have been studying how such people respond to sleep deprivation. Two dozen volunteers, some genetic owls and some genetic larks, were forced to stay awake for two days.

The genetic larks reacted to this worse than the owls did. In particular, larks given memory tests and puzzles to solve between the hours of four and eight in the morning turned in far worse performances than did owls. Their brain waves, as measured by electroencephalography, also suggested that when they were eventually allowed to sleep, they slept more deeply than owls. (Deep sleep is associated with slow brain waves, and larks spent 50% more time in such slow-wave sleep than owls did.)

What implications that may have for employers is not fully clear. As the researchers point out, this was a laboratory study, not one that involved handling the problems of the real world. Nevertheless, it is intriguing. There may yet come a time when employers running night shifts will want a blood sample from prospective employees—if only to protect themselves against negligence suits should someone have an accident."