Recent work from our lab has shown that Caenorhabditis elegans sleeps after exposure to stressful stimuli, including heat shock. We hypothesize that disruption of proteostasis is the underlying trigger of this behavioral quiescence. Therefore, we expect animals with constitutive chaperone activity to require less sleep after heat shock compared to wild type. To test our hypothesis, we examined the behavioral responses of
daf-21 mutants after heat shock. DAF-21/HSP90 is a negative regulator of the heat shock response, and these mutants are known to display heightened chaperone activity. We find that these mutants show a reduced sleep response relative to wild type following heat shock. This result supports our hypothesis that a core function of sleep may be related to mitigating disruptions of proteostasis. We aim to further test our model by examining the effects of sleep on proteostasis, by examining metastable protein function in wild type and sleep-defective mutants. Our results on these temperature sensitive mutants will be presented.