Acute control of the sleep switch in Drosophila reveals a role for gap junctions in regulating behavioral responsiveness
- The University of Queensland, Australia
- Washington University in St. Louis, United States
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
Martyna J Grabowska
Bruno van Swinderen
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.
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
-
- 15,185
- views
-
- 681
- downloads
-
- 32
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
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)
Acute control of the sleep switch in Drosophila reveals a role for gap junctions in regulating behavioral responsiveness
eLife 7:e37105.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37105
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Odour processing exhibits multiple parallels between vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems. Insects, in particular, have emerged as relevant models for olfactory studies because of the tractability of their olfactory circuits. Here, we used fast calcium imaging to track the activity of projection neurons in the honey bee antennal lobe (AL) during olfactory stimulation at high temporal resolution. We observed a heterogeneity of response profiles and an abundance of inhibitory activities, resulting in various response latencies and stimulus-specific post-odour neural signatures. Recorded calcium signals were fed to a mushroom body (MB) model constructed implementing the fundamental features of connectivity between olfactory projection neurons, Kenyon cells (KC), and MB output neurons (MBON). The model accounts for the increase of odorant discrimination in the MB compared to the AL and reveals the recruitment of two distinct KC populations that represent odorants and their aftersmell as two separate but temporally coherent neural objects. Finally, we showed that the learning-induced modulation of KC-to-MBON synapses can explain both the variations in associative learning scores across different conditioning protocols used in bees and the bees' response latency. Thus, it provides a simple explanation of how the time contingency between the stimulus and the reward can be encoded without the need for time tracking. This study broadens our understanding of olfactory coding and learning in honey bees. It demonstrates that a model based on simple MB connectivity rules and fed with real physiological data can explain fundamental aspects of odour processing and associative learning.
-
- Neuroscience
The neuropeptide neurotensin can reduce status epilepticus and its associated consequences through induction of therapeutic hypothermia when bound to a molecule that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
