To Sleep, Perchance to Survive?

Multicellular organisms exist in a sea of microbes. Survival is enabled by an immense diversity of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) that maintain homeostasis with the microbiota. During pathogen infection, fruit fly survival varies directly with sleep. A newly-identified fruit fly sleep-regulator is also an AMP (Toda et al. Science 2019;363:509–515). Its characterization may clarify the association between sleep and surviving infection