When wounded, our body sets off a complex immune response. As part of it, the wound produces small antimicrobial molecules to fight off the pathogens locally. Researchers from the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) of the TU Dresden and Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in collaboration with the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in France have found that these natural antibiotics can also act as long-range molecular messengers. They signal across tissues from the site of injury to the brain, sending a message to increase sleep and raise the chances for surviving the injury. The results have been published in the journal “Current Biology”.