Acute control of the sleep switch in Drosophila reveals a role for gap junctions in regulating behavioral responsiveness
Abstract
Sleep is a dynamic process in most animals, involving distinct stages that probably achieve multiple functions for the brain. Before sleep functions can be initiated, it is likely that behavioral responsiveness to the outside world needs to be reduced first, even while animals are still awake. Recent work in Drosophila has uncovered a sleep switch in the dorsal fan-shaped body (dFB) of the fly's central brain, but it is unknown if these sleep-promoting neurons also govern the acute need to ignore salient stimuli in the environment during sleep transitions. We found that optogenetic activation of the sleep switch suppressed behavioral responsiveness to mechanical stimuli, even in awake flies, indicating a broader role for these neurons in regulating arousal. The dFB-mediated suppression mechanism and its associated neural correlates requires innexin6 expression, suggesting that the acute need to reduce sensory perception when flies fall asleep is mediated in part by electrical synapses.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01 NS076980)
- Melvyn HW Yap
- Paul Shaw
- Bruno van Swinderen
National Health and Medical Research Council (GNT1065713)
- Michael Troup
- Chelsie Rohrscheib
- Aoife Larkin
- Bruno van Swinderen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Mani Ramaswami, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Publication history
- Received: March 29, 2018
- Accepted: August 14, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 15, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 30, 2018 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2018, Troup et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 14,278
- Page views
-
- 607
- Downloads
-
- 13
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, PubMed Central, Scopus.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Motivated by the potential of objective neurophysiological markers to index thalamocortical function in patients with severe psychiatric illnesses, we comprehensively characterized key non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep parameters across multiple domains, their interdependencies, and their relationship to waking event-related potentials and symptom severity. In 72 schizophrenia (SCZ) patients and 58 controls, we confirmed a marked reduction in sleep spindle density in SCZ and extended these findings to show that fast and slow spindle properties were largely uncorrelated. We also describe a novel measure of slow oscillation and spindle interaction that was attenuated in SCZ. The main sleep findings were replicated in a demographically distinct sample, and a joint model, based on multiple NREM components, statistically predicted disease status in the replication cohort. Although also altered in patients, auditory event-related potentials elicited during wake were unrelated to NREM metrics. Consistent with a growing literature implicating thalamocortical dysfunction in SCZ, our characterization identifies independent NREM and wake EEG biomarkers that may index distinct aspects of SCZ pathophysiology and point to multiple neural mechanisms underlying disease heterogeneity. This study lays the groundwork for evaluating these neurophysiological markers, individually or in combination, to guide efforts at treatment and prevention as well as identifying individuals most likely to benefit from specific interventions.
-
- Medicine
- Neuroscience
Background: The heterogeneity of white matter damage and symptoms in concussion has been identified as a major obstacle to therapeutic innovation. In contrast, most diffusion MRI (dMRI) studies on concussion have traditionally relied on group-comparison approaches that average out heterogeneity. To leverage, rather than average out, concussion heterogeneity, we combined dMRI and multivariate statistics to characterize multi-tract multi-symptom relationships.
Methods: Using cross-sectional data from 306 previously-concussed children aged 9-10 from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, we built connectomes weighted by classical and emerging diffusion measures. These measures were combined into two informative indices, the first representing microstructural complexity, the second representing axonal density. We deployed pattern-learning algorithms to jointly decompose these connectivity features and 19 symptom measures.
Results: Early multi-tract multi-symptom pairs explained the most covariance and represented broad symptom categories, such as a general problems pair, or a pair representing all cognitive symptoms, and implicated more distributed networks of white matter tracts. Further pairs represented more specific symptom combinations, such as a pair representing attention problems exclusively, and were associated with more localized white matter abnormalities. Symptom representation was not systematically related to tract representation across pairs. Sleep problems were implicated across most pairs, but were related to different connections across these pairs. Expression of multi-tract features was not driven by sociodemographic and injury-related variables, as well as by clinical subgroups defined by the presence of ADHD. Analyses performed on a replication dataset showed consistent results.
Conclusions: Using a double-multivariate approach, we identified clinically-informative, cross-demographic multi-tract multi-symptom relationships. These results suggest that rather than clear one-to-one symptom-connectivity disturbances, concussions may be characterized by subtypes of symptom/connectivity relationships. The symptom/connectivity relationships identified in multi-tract multi-symptom pairs were not apparent in single-tract/single-symptom analyses. Future studies aiming to better understand connectivity/symptom relationships should take into account multi-tract multi-symptom heterogeneity.
Funding: financial support for this work from a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (GIG), an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (SS), a Restracomp Research Fellowship provided by the Hospital for Sick Children (SS), an Institutional Research Chair in Neuroinformatics (MD), as well as a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council CREATE grant (MD).