Recovery of sleep after fetal preoptic transplantation in medial preoptic area-lesioned rats.

Changes in sleep after fetal preoptic (POA) tissue transplantation were studied in rats which had been made insomniac by a medial preoptic area (mPOA) lesion. Two days after the N-methyl D-aspartic acid (NMDA) lesion of the mPOA, fetal POA tissues (obtained from 14- to 17-day-old fetuses) were transplanted into the lesioned mPOA. Insomnia was less marked in these animals, as compared to nontransplanted lesioned rats, even on the 4th day after transplantation. The quantum of sleep nearly attained the prelesion level by the 20th day. Body weight also showed recovery after transplantation. Rectal temperature, which was increased by the lesion of the mPOA, remained unaltered even after the transplantation. These results suggest that the recovery of sleep and rectal temperature may follow different time courses. Surviving transplanted neurons were seen at the site of lesion on postmortem examination. Humoral interaction between the host and the transplant may be responsible for the early recovery of sleep, though the establishment of neural connections between the host and transplant might have contributed to the later recovery. This is the first study to show the recovery of sleep function in insomniac animals after fetal preoptic tissue transplantation. However, the specificity of the POA fetal tissue, in comparison with other neural tissues to promote sleep recovery, remains to be established.