Varin Christophe, Bonnavion Patricia
Laboratory of Neurophysiology, Université Libre de Bruxelles Neuroscience Institute, ULB-UNI, Brussels, Belgium.
University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium.
Handb Exp Pharmacol. 2019;253:153-206. doi: 10.1007/164_2018_183.
Over the past decade, basic sleep research investigating the circuitry controlling sleep and wakefulness has been boosted by pharmacosynthetic approaches, including chemogenetic techniques using designed receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADD). DREADD offers a series of tools that selectively control neuronal activity as a way to probe causal relationship between neuronal sub-populations and the regulation of the sleep-wake cycle. Following the path opened by optogenetics, DREADD tools applied to discrete neuronal sub-populations in numerous brain areas quickly made their contribution to the discovery and the expansion of our understanding of critical brain structures involved in a wide variety of behaviors and in the control of vigilance state architecture.
在过去十年中，研究控制睡眠和觉醒的神经回路的基础睡眠研究因药物合成方法而得到推动，这些方法包括使用仅由设计药物特异性激活的设计受体的化学遗传学技术（DREADD）。DREADD提供了一系列工具，可选择性地控制神经元活动，以此探究神经元亚群与睡眠-觉醒周期调节之间的因果关系。沿着光遗传学开辟的道路，应用于众多脑区离散神经元亚群的DREADD工具迅速为发现和扩展我们对涉及多种行为及警觉状态结构控制的关键脑结构的理解做出了贡献。
