Researchers in the Harvard Med school and the University at Buffalo Med school and Biomedical Sciences have discovered an area of the brain accountable for causing people to fall under a deep sleep.
This slumber-promoting circuit, that is located deep in the primitive brainstem, is only the second such “sleep node” ever discovered within the brains of mammals, the study authors said. In research published online last month in Nature Neuroscience, they let you know that this region is not only able to but additionally essential for producing what is known as slow wave sleep (SWS) in humans.
By utilizing genetically targeted activation and optogenetically based mapping to examine the brain’s circuitry, they found that 1 / 2 of all sleep-promoting activity originates from an area of the brainstem referred to as parafacial zone (PZ). The brainstem is a primordial area of the brain and it is responsible for regulating the basic functions necessary for survival, including breathing, body temperature, blood pressure and heartbeat.
“The close association of a sleep center along with other regions which are critical for life highlights the evolutionary need for sleep in the brain,” said Caroline E. Bass, assistant professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology within the University of Buffalo Med school and Biomedical Sciences and a co-author on the recently-published paper.
She and her colleagues found that a particular kind of neuron in the PZ which creates the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) accounts for producing SWS. Furthermore, using a group of innovative tools, these were able to precisely control those neurons remotely, essentially letting them turn the neurons off and on when needed.
“These new molecular approaches allow unprecedented treatments for thinking processes in the cellular level,” said Christelle Ancelet of the Harvard School of Medicine. “Before these tools were developed, we quite often used ‘electrical stimulation’ to activate a region, but the problem is that doing this stimulates everything the electrode touches and even surrounding areas this didn’t. It was a sledgehammer approach, when what we needed would be a scalpel.”
“To get the precision necessary for these experiments, we introduced a virus in to the PZ that expressed a ‘designer’ receptor on GABA neurons only but didn’t otherwise alter brain function,” added Patrick Fuller, assistant professor at Harvard and senior author on the Nature Neuroscience paper. “When we switched on the GABA neurons in the PZ, the animals quickly fell right into a deep sleep without using sedatives or sleeping pills.”
The research team, whose work was funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asserted the precise interactions between these neurons and other sleep and wake-promoting parts of the brain still need to be analyzed. However, they feel their findings could ultimately result in the invention of recent medications to treat insomnia and other sleep problems, as well as the growth and development of safer and much more effective anesthetics.
“We are in a really transformative point in neuroscience
, where the utilization of designer genes provides for us unprecedented ability to control the brain,” said Bass. “We are now able to answer fundamental questions of thinking processes, which have traditionally been beyond our reach, such as the ‘why’ rest, one of the more enduring mysteries within the neurosciences.”
