Sleep Drive-Inducing Neurons

In Sleep Drive Is Encoded by Neural Plastic Changes in a Dedicated Circuit, the experimenters studied a group of neurons, which are cells that send signals throughout the body, in flies that they found to be associated with inducing sleep drive, which leads to sleep, as a result of the sleep need.

In order to find which neuron was responsible for causing sleep drive in flies, the experimenters used heat to activate different kinds of neurons. They found that a significant proportion of the flies fell asleep during the time heat was applied and woke up shortly after it stopped. They also found a small group of flies that continued to sleep even though heat stopped being applied. Further analysis of these flies showed activity in a specific …show more content…
Recent studies found a set of neurons that directly causes sleep in response to other neural sleep drive signals. The experimenters wanted to test whether the sleep drive-inducing neurons from the previous experiment had a direct affect on sleep-inducing neurons, which have a direct affect on sleep. The experimenters confirmed this idea in multiple ways. One way they did this was by blocking sleep-inducing neurons and measuring the amount of sleep after activating sleep drive-inducing neurons. The results suggested that sleep drive-inducing neurons have an indirect affect on sleep because they communicate with sleep-inducing neurons; when sleep inducing-neurons were blocked from sending signals, flies slept significantly less even after sleep …show more content…
After analyzing several different proteins in a sleep drive-inducing neuron after sleep deprivation, they found that a protein subunit of a receptor, which controls what can move into a neuron, was expressed in a significantly larger amount than all the other proteins they analyzed. To test whether this subunit altered sleep drive signaling from sleep drive-inducing neurons, the experimenters analyzed genetically modified flies that did not contain these receptors. They found large levels of the molecule from earlier experiments that served as an indicator for changes in the strength of sleep drive signaling and neural structure. The experimenters also found that these flies had less sleep amount and depth, which suggests a lack of function in sleep drive-inducing neurons. So, similarly to the calcium experiments, these experiments suggest that the receptor in question has a role in regulating sleep