Welcome
As any new parent knows, newborn infants do not sleep in a consolidated fashion during the night. Instead, newborns sleep and feed intermittently across the day and night with consolidated sleep patterns not emerging until 3-12 months. Interestingly, these rapid transitions between different behavioral states in young animals occur in the presence of a functional internal time-keeping mechanism (central circadian clock), suggesting that rhythmic behaviors such as feeding and sleep do not initially receive circadian input. Understanding how rhythmic behaviors develop is essential, as sleep and circadian disruptions are a common co-morbidity in many neurodevelopmental disorders. However, little is known about the development of rhythmic behaviors or how these developmental programs contribute to rhythmic behaviors across the lifespan.
Our lab is interested in understanding how rhythmic behaviors such as sleep and feeding develop. Ultimately, we hope to examine how behavioral rhythms might be advantageous to developing organisms and influence adult behaviors. We use behavioral neuroscience, molecular biology, and genetics approaches in Drosophila melanogaster larvae and adult flies. Drosophila is a powerful system to answer these questions as studies in fruit flies have advanced our understanding of the genetic, molecular, and neural basis for sleep and circadian behavior. For more details about specific projects we are working on in the lab, see our Research Page.
Lab News
- August 2024: The Poe lab officially opens! Recruiting research assistant (ad coming soon), graduate students, & postdoctoral fellows.