If you aren't getting enough sleep at night, you may be at risk of short-circuiting your system, according to a recent study.

Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville conducted a plant study and found that lack of adequate sleep can do more than just make you tired. It can also weaken you and interfere with a fundamental cellular process that drives physical growth, physiological adaptation and even brain activity.

"When we misalign our behavior with our circadian clock, for example by creating jet lag, or by working as a night owl, we do not only disrupt normal physiological processes such as cycles of appetite and body temperature," researcher Albrecht von Arnim said in a statement. "This work in plants suggests that we may also be interfering with a more fundamental cellular process, protein synthesis."

Muscle action, brain activity, growth and development are functions all performed by proteins whose synthesis is carefully regulated, he said.

"For example, when cells are stressed by high temperatures or from a virus infection, they drastically reduce their protein synthesis activity," von Arnim said.

For the study, researchers examined how protein synthesis--the process that determines how organisms grow and how cells renew themselves--changes over the course of the daily day-night cycle. They also explored whether any such changes are controlled by the organism's internal time keeper, the circadian clock.

The findings could also have implications for agricultural production as farmers and companies seek to better cultivate land and maximize outputs from plants required to sustain human life.

"Protein synthesis is part of the basis for crop yield," von Arnim said.

The findings are detailed in the journal Plant Cell.