A discovery by scientists in Europe has uncovered the gene that allows people to get by on only 4 hours sleep per night.

The Europe-wide study analysed the sleeping habits of over 4000 people in a survey across 7 different countries, and evaluated the participants' genes and compared them to their answers.

The study found that participants possessing two copies of a common variant of the ABCC9 gene were able to live on "significantly shorter" amounts of sleep, as opposed to those who had two copies of a different variant of the gene.