The “Short Sleep” Gene: When Six Hours is Enough

A new study reports the discovery of the first gene involved in regulating the length of human sleep. A rare mutation in the “DEC2” gene enables some people to function well on only six hours of sleep per night.“Subjects with the mutation are able to live unaffected by shorter amounts of sleep throughout their lives,” senior author Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, said in a UC San Francisco