Topic: homeostatic sleep control

Sleep is a crucial part of everyday life, but the neural networks that regulate behavioural manifestations of sleep are not fully understood. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, dorsal fan-shaped body neurons (dFBNs) sit at the centre of homeostatic sleep control: the neurons’ excitability increases with sleep drive, and their artificial activation induces sleep. Despite significant advances in understanding of the molecular events that regulate the activity of dFBNs, insight into how they impose sleep on the organism is still lagging. By combining optogenetics and in vivo patch-clamp re