Topic: Sleep control

The neural control of sleep requires that sleep need is sensed during waking and discharged during sleep. While sleep loss has widespread consequences in the whole body and brain, perhaps the only realistic opportunity for separating causation from correlation exists in specialist neurons with active roles in sleep. To obtain an unbiased view of molecular changes in the brain underlying these processes, we characterized the transcriptomes of single sleep-control cells isolated from rested and sleep-deprived flies. Transcripts upregulated after sleep deprivation, in sleep-control neurons projec

Recent advances in understanding the biomolecular mechanisms of sleep control in the Drosophila model have implicated mitochondrial ROS as a key cog in the machine. Hyperkinetic, the beta subunit to the potassium channel Shaker, has been shown to act as a conduit translating rising levels of that mitochondrial ROS during waking hours to heightened cell excitability in the sleep-controlling dorsal fan-shaped body-projecting neurons (dFB) in flies. In order to explore the universality of this mechanism, we instigated a parallel study in mice. Hyperkinetic has three homologs in the mammalian geno