Who has never suffered from sleep disorders ?

Background

A 2008 report of the INPES, a French public institute, has shown that 45% of the 25-45 year-old population think that they do not sleep enough. This lack of sleep causes a fair bit of negative impacts : decrease of focus, weakened immune system, cardiovascular disease risk increase ... Even if these statistics are high, today's medicine is not efficient enough when it comes to heal people suffering from sleep disorders. A classic example would be sleeping pills for chronic insomnia. But now, they only treat the symptoms, not the source.

Objectives

This year, iGEM Bordeaux goals to study DSIP, a sleep-inducing peptide which seems to be promising for our dilemma. In order to understand in which mechanisms this peptide is involved, it will be produced by the E. coli bacteria and then given to a nematode called C. elegans. It could be interesting to find a a way for producing directly the peptide in C. elegans too.

On another aspect, we want to control the nematode's sleep. In one hand, we want to make a photo-inductible system which be used on sleep genes promoters. On the other hand, we want to create a new tool for modifying by epigenetics the sleep genes : EpiCrispr. Based on the CRISPR-CAS9 concept, we want to design it by two strategies : both will use a fusion technique between a methylase and CAS9, but the second approach is inspired on Sun-Tag technique.