
A molecule called ‘Sandman’ could help solve the ‘mystery of sleep’ - chriskanan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/08/03/a-molecule-called-sandman-could-help-solve-the-mystery-of-sleep/
======
jjallen
_to some of us (ahem, yours truly) the idea that there 's a "mystery of sleep"
might seem a bit, well, strange. Don't we sleep because we get tired?_

Quotes like this are typical of the American tendency to be pseudo-proud of
being unintelligent, uneducated or apathetic. I'm surprised they included it
and disappointed they did. Perhaps to help the readership identify with the
columnist? But then again the readers are actually reading something
scientific, so I don't get it.

~~~
omonra
I think the purpose of this device is to provide context to the problem. If
you are about to provide the scientific explanation for something all of us
experience every day "Why do things fall down" / "Why is sugar sweet" it helps
to take a step back and remind the reader that there is a scientific
explanation for the phenomenon they are so familiar with (so much so that it
feels unnatural to even question it in the first place).

~~~
bllguo
maybe he dislikes the "ahem, yours truly" part? Although I agree with your
point, to me that phrase strongly conveys the "pseudo-proud" attitude the
parent OP was referring to

------
daughart
It would be great if this opened the door to sleep aids that activated the
brain's natural sleep induction mechanisms, as opposed to today's sleep aids,
which are basically just sedative/CNS depressant/muscle relaxers.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Well, this is what melatonin does and its OTC. My horrible insomnia was cured
not by Ambien, but by .5mg of Walgreen's melatonin and even now I rarely take
it.

Its also probably time we admitted human beings can't fit into lifestyles
where they're bombareded with blue light, stress, etc right before bedtime.
The Western lifestyle is fairly anti-traditional and old fashioned things like
prayer/meditation/whatever before bed and calm family time of putting the
children to bed or reading to them has been replaced with ipad usage/internet
tomfoolery, or tv watching.

I doubt there will ever be a pill to fix this. If you're serious about fixing
insomnia then you need to do the legwork of proper lifestyle change.
Personally, the benefits I get from running flux on the desktop as well as
daily meditation are incredible. Pharmacological solutions shouldn't be our
first instinct.

~~~
dimino
The problem with your "melatonin" suggestion is that there's no way to know
how much melatonin you actually took, since there is no regulation on the
chemical, and the "sleep pills" that are purchasable don't say on the label
what concentration they're made at, and concentrations vary by brand, and
could vary bottle to bottle (due to an inexact manufacturing technique, for
example).

~~~
duckingtest
In several EU countries, you can buy melatonin pills made by an actual
pharmaceutical companies (which also manufacture prescription drugs) OTC. You
could order it online. Note there's a difference between unregulated
supplement and an OTC drug.

Although I think your worry about quality excessive, it's not like making
pills is rocket science. The supplement companies most likely get the powder
in bulk from biochemical factories that also manufacture prescription drugs.

~~~
dalke
In the US, the supplement industry is much less regulated than the
pharmaceutical industry.

The concern is not excessive, at least in the US. Consider
[https://consumerist.com/2016/07/27/anyone-can-make-
market-a-...](https://consumerist.com/2016/07/27/anyone-can-make-market-a-
dietary-supplement-including-consumer-reports/) :

> While real drugs — prescription or over-the-counter — must demonstrate
> levels of safety and effectiveness before hitting store shelves, dietary
> supplements are effectively regulated like food products.

[https://consumerist.com/2016/01/20/7-things-you-need-to-
know...](https://consumerist.com/2016/01/20/7-things-you-need-to-know-from-
frontlines-investigation-on-supplements-safety/) gives a summary of a
Frontline episode on the topic; Frontline does documentaries on public affairs
topics.

Or, from 2001,
[http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/6/1101.full](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/6/1101.full)
\- "All plant products were correctly identified by botanical plant species
(ie, Panax species or E. senticosus); however, concentrations of marker
compounds differed significantly from labeled amounts. There was also
significant product-to-product variability: concentrations of ginsenosides
varied by 15- and 36-fold in capsules and liquids, respectively, and
concentrations of eleutherosides varied by 43- and 200-fold in capsules and
liquids, respectively."

Or from the 1990s,
[http://www.sportsci.org/jour/0003/lmb.html](http://www.sportsci.org/jour/0003/lmb.html)
:

> Analysis of 16 commercial DHEA products revealed that only half the products
> contained the amount of DHEA stated on the product label; content varied
> from 0 to 150% of the stated content (Parasrampuria et al., 1998).

> Melatonin supplements have failed to meet quality claims or delivery
> profiles stated on their labels (Hahm et al., 1999).

It lists others as well.

------
erdevs
Well, this ended on quite the cliffhanger. Incredibly curious what is next
discovered about this "sandman" ion channel and what it interacts with and
responds to.

Additional links:

Oxford write-up which sticks more prosaicLly to the science (I imply no
pejorative connotation to "prosaic", I simply mean there are fewer flourishes
and asides): [http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-08-03-researchers-discover-
san...](http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-08-03-researchers-discover-sandmans-
role-sleep-control)

Paper in Nature:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19055.html)

------
duckingtest
The article doesn't spell it out, but it seems that's how dopaminergic
stimulants make it hard to sleep. Dopamine deactivates the sleep circuit. This
opens the way to stimulants that doesn't impair sleep and the reverse. That
could explain (partially unknown) modafinil's mode of action - a dri that
works preferentially on the sleep neurons.

------
ninjakeyboard
It's not a molecule though - it's an ion channel. There is no compound called
sandman as I understand this.

~~~
oasisbob
The authors refer to the CG8713 gene product as Sandman, which is a single
molecule. Flybase associates this gene with a single polypeptide, predicted to
be 395 amino acids long [1].

My research skills are rusty, but I found a paper which makes it sound like
this channel is probably a heteromer [2].

So yeah, the ion channel is almost certainly composed of more than one subunit
(and thus more than one polypeptide, and more than one molecule), but the
researchers are focusing on this subunit.

[1]
[http://flybase.org/reports/FBpp0087858.html](http://flybase.org/reports/FBpp0087858.html)
[2]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17074048](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17074048)

------
ars
I have my own theory.

We sleep because that's when we are logged out of the virtual game that this
world is.

I'm only semi-serious.

But let's work with it. What if we research sleep right until there is nothing
left to find out, and we since can't figure out any reason at all for it?

Could we use that to postulate for a reason that is non-physical? Spiritual?
Virtual reality? Something else?

~~~
panic
When you're logged out of a virtual game, nobody can force you to log back in.
But you can wake up someone who's sleeping.

~~~
ars
Some people are hard to wake up.

Have you never set a game with alerts that make noise if something interesting
is happening, so you rush back and play?

The delay in waking up is how long it takes the "player" to get back to his
chair.

If the player did not go back that would be seen by us as fainting, or in
longer situations, a coma.

------
gsmethells
" ... and future research will explore what affects sleep _quality_ once
asleep ..." :)

------
omgitstom
"Sleeping animals are incredibly vulnerable to attacks, with no obvious
benefit to make up for it — at best, they waste precious hours that could be
used finding food or seducing a mate; at worst, they could get eaten."

It seems pretty obvious that sleep had an evolutionary advantage to conserve
energy when the species couldn't be productive. For example, human sleep
during the night because we can't forage / hunt / find a mate during the night
because our vision requires light.

~~~
gnaritas
That doesn't seem obvious at all, it presumes sleeping is about conserving
energy and that's an unwarranted assumption and baseless assumption. Sleep
very well could be a requirement for brains to work they way they do. If you
are deprived of sleep you will shortly go crazy; sleep isn't about saving
energy.

If you see anything that seems obvious, you can bet science already checked
that out and moved past it and that it's more complicated than that.

Anytime your beliefs conflict with science, you should immediately question
your beliefs, not the science. The odds are absurdly high, near a virtual
certainty, that your beliefs are wrong; never assume science is missing the
obvious (unless you're a scientist and it's your field of study, then you
might be onto something but you're still probably wrong).

~~~
outworlder
Yeah. For starters, there is a whole bunch of toxins that build up when you
don't sleep enough. But it can't be the whole story, as why wouldn't we have
mechanisms to remove those and keep the brain functioning?

It can't be all about memory retention. There are some fascinating studies on
how some groups of neurons repeat the same patterns they did when the organism
was awake, presumedly for long-term storage. But why can't storage happen
while awake?

There must be a reason why these "brain batch processes" run while most of the
brain is shutdown.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I've found that it's best to not think that evolution optimizes for the best
thing but rather that it optimizes for "good enough". Sometimes they are one
and the same but they don't have to be.

Sleep could have started as a rudimentary adaptation to one thing and ended up
being refined and coopted for other things.

~~~
Freestyler_3
Evolution is diverse, if all living things need sleep then I think its A:
something that is absolutely needed, without it you wont survive [guaranteed]
B: A left over from our common ancestor

