People spend about a third of their lives asleep. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how our brains control falling asleep and waking up. Now, researchers led by Prof. Henrik Bringmann at the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) of TUD Dresden University of Technology discovered another piece of this puzzle. The team showed that a single brain signal acts like a biological switch—both triggering sleep and ending it.

Their findings, published in the journal Current Biology, were made possible by studying a tiny roundworm, C. elegans, a powerful model organism in biology.

“It is really important to be able to fall asleep, but just as important to wake up too,” says Prof. Bringmann, research group leader at BIOTEC who led the study.