Joiner William J, Crocker Amanda, White Benjamin H, Sehgal Amita
Center for Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology, University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.
Nature. 2006 Jun 8;441(7094):757-60. doi: 10.1038/nature04811.
Sleep is one of the few major whole-organ phenomena for which no function and no underlying mechanism have been conclusively demonstrated. Sleep could result from global changes in the brain during wakefulness or it could be regulated by specific loci that recruit the rest of the brain into the electrical and metabolic states characteristic of sleep. Here we address this issue by exploiting the genetic tractability of the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, which exhibits the hallmarks of vertebrate sleep. We show that large changes in sleep are achieved by spatial and temporal enhancement of cyclic-AMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) activity specifically in the adult mushroom bodies of Drosophila. Other manipulations of the mushroom bodies, such as electrical silencing, increasing excitation or ablation, also alter sleep. These results link sleep regulation to an anatomical locus known to be involved in learning and memory.
睡眠是少数几种尚未确凿证明其功能和潜在机制的主要全身器官现象之一。睡眠可能是清醒时大脑的整体变化导致的，也可能由特定位点调节，这些位点使大脑其他部分进入睡眠特有的电和代谢状态。在这里，我们通过利用果蝇（黑腹果蝇）的遗传易处理性来解决这个问题，果蝇表现出脊椎动物睡眠的特征。我们表明，通过特异性地在果蝇成虫蘑菇体中时空增强环磷酸腺苷依赖性蛋白激酶（PKA）的活性，可以实现睡眠的大幅变化。对蘑菇体的其他操作，如电沉默、增加兴奋性或切除，也会改变睡眠。这些结果将睡眠调节与一个已知参与学习和记忆的解剖位点联系起来。
