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Article: Sleeping to fuel the immune system: mammalian sleep and resistance to parasites.(Commentary)(Report)
- Article from:
- BMC Evolutionary Biology
- Article date:
- January 9, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 BioMed Central Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Authors: Mark R Opp (corresponding author) [1]
Sleep is perhaps the greatest enigma in all of biology. Although there have been numerous hypotheses, the question as to the function of sleep remains unanswered. Sleep states are well characterized in mammals and birds, and there is convincing evidence for sleep in animals of "lower" phyla, including invertebrates [1]. Because many characteristics of sleep differ quite dramatically across phyla [2, 3], it seems that the lowest common denominator of a core function(s) for sleep must exist at the cellular level [4, 5].
Although we may lack an unequivocal functional explanation for sleep, the same ...
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