A new study shed light on a profound connection between humans and jellyfish while illustrating the importance of one of the most fundamental human needs.
According to Discover Magazine, researchers at Bar-Ilan University discovered one of the biggest reasons animals rest and sleep, courtesy of looking at jellyfish and other species without brains but with nervous systems.
What they found was that sleep and rest are essential to protect neurons from DNA damage.
Neurons, or nerve cells, are the core of all animals' nervous systems, allowing brains to communicate with the rest of the body and controlling animals like jellyfish that lack brains. The researchers found that neurons accumulate damage to their DNA during waking hours and that sleep is essential to giving those cells a chance to repair that damage and avoid long-term issues.
Researchers discovered that jellyfish, zebrafish, and sea anemones all maintain schedules that include at least eight hours of sleep and rest, a cycle that closely mirrors that of humans.
"Our findings suggest that the capacity of sleep to reduce neuronal DNA damage is an ancestral trait already present in one of the simplest animals with nervous systems," said Lior Appelbaum in a press release on the project. Appelbaum is the principal investigator of the Molecular Neuroscience Lab at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University.
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Scientists have long wondered about the reason behind sleep, as it seemed to serve no basic purpose. Time spent sleeping or resting is time not spent hunting, eating, or mating, and leaves the animal vulnerable to predators. Experts previously speculated that sleep was for dreams, to provide the body time to rest and recover, or to help memory transfer in the brain.
However, it turns out that the process involved is even more basic than that. Researchers found that when animals get less sleep, DNA damage to neurons worsens, and they will often sleep more to accommodate that damage. They also learned that when DNA damage was worsened by UV light or a DNA-damaging chemical, the animals would respond by sleeping longer, giving those neurons more time to repair themselves.
"Sleep may have originally evolved to provide a consolidated period for neural maintenance, a function so fundamental that it may have been preserved across the entire animal kingdom," said Appelbaum.
The research highlights the benefits of studying the natural world and how that can have a major impact on humanity in the process.
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The research could eventually help shed more light on the processes behind neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and help understand the root causes behind those conditions.
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