Visual experience drives sleep need in Drosophila

Sleep optimizes waking behavior, however, waking experience may also influence sleep. We used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to investigate the relationship between visual experience and sleep in wild-type and mutant flies. We found that the classical visual mutant, optomotor-blind (omb), which has undeveloped horizontal system/vertical system (HS/VS) motion-processing cells and are defective in motion and visual salience perception, showed dramatically reduced and less consolidated sleep compared to wild-type flies. In contrast, optogenetic activation of the HS/VS motion-processing neurons in wild-type flies led to an increase in sleep following the activation, suggesting an increase in sleep pressure. Surprisingly, exposing wild-type flies to repetitive motion stimuli for extended periods did not increase sleep pressure. However, we observed that exposing flies to more complex image sequences from a movie led to more consolidated sleep, particularly when images were randomly shuffled through time. Our results suggest that specific forms of visual experience that involve motion circuits and complex, nonrepetitive imagery, drive sleep need in Drosophila.