Here is some pilot data that may interest you...

We have probed the tip of the iceberg with an analysis that does not look at the individual genes but instead looks at overall methylation. We've done this for a few participants who were short sleepers compared to a few long sleepers. The figure below shows what we found: short sleepers had overall more hypermethylation and long sleepers more hypomethylation between the start of the semester and 10 weeks later! [Remember that hypermethylation tends to turn off gene function.] This means that short-term differences in sleep duration can have significant consequences throughout the genome. We need to follow up on this finding. With your support, we will! We presented these findings at the SLEEP 2014 meeting (Carskadon, M.A., McGeary, J.E., Jacobs, D., Fu, A., Sharkey, K.M., Knopik, V.S., and Zhu, Y. DNA methylation associated with sleep duration: preliminary results. Sleep 37(Suppl.): A48, 2014.).