Sleeping Cells

Sleep, or as Shakespeare put it "nature’s soft nurse", is a vital function necessary for our overall health and well-being. Sleeping plays an important role in brain development, strengthening connections that have been made by neurons during the day and solidifying memories. Over our lifetime, our sleep duration changes, and the molecular details of how this is regulated are still mainly unknown. But by studying mice with abnormal sleep patterns, researchers have identified multiple genes important for regulating sleep duration, and which also allow changes in calcium molecules to take place in mice brain cells (neurons). They also found that by impairing calcium receptors in neurons, the neurons became excited and active (shown in brighter green on the right). This caused calcium molecules to flow out of the neurons and ‘wake the mice up’, whereas opposite calcium flow, into the neurons (left), caused the mice to fall asleep .

Today is the start of the UK's National Stop Snoring Week

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image courtesy of the Ueda lab, Department of Systems Pharmacology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo
• Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Published in Neuron, April 2016