Science: Just want to stay up late, don't want to be sleepy? Yes, there can be! Xu Min/Li Weilong team reveals how to regulate "difficulty"

In modern society, the pace of life is fast, work pressure, many young people in order to set aside their own an hour or two, often "reluctant" to sleep.
, lack of sleep can have many bad consequences, the most immediate feeling is to be sleepy.
irresistible distress makes people fall asleep in class, fall asleep in meetings, and even fall asleep while driving... Today, Science, a leading academic journal, published a new study on sleep online.
The Xu Min Research Group from the Center for Brain Science and Intelligent Technology Excellence and Innovation (Neuroscience Research Institute) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Li Weilong Research Group of Peking University, has revealed how "difficulty" is produced in the brain.
Scientists identified neurons in the brains of mice that regulate distress, reducing the amount of sleep the mice needed each day - the equivalent of 1.5 hours less sleep a day without getting sleepy! The researchers point out that the core feature of sleep behavior is "sleep steady-state regulation": as waking hours increase, sleep deprivation increases, eventually leading to sleep, and sleep is the process by which sleep is gradually cleared.
years of research, it is now widely believed that distress is related to the accumulation of a molecule called adenosine.
adenosine is a "by-product" of the cellular energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
, the longer you wake up, the more ATP is consumed, and the more adenosine molecules outside the cell, the more they combine with the corresponding subjects to inhibit nerve activity, and people become more and more sleepy.
, how on earth does the brain regulate the release and accumulation of adenosine molecules? In the past, it was limited to technical means, and little was understood.
study, Professor Li developed a new genetically coded adenosine probe that can be seen by observing changes in the fluorescence intensity of the probe.
, traditional testing methods can measure adenosine concentration every 10 minutes, and the new method can see rapid changes within 0.1 seconds.
using this technique, the researchers looked at changes in the concentration of extracellular adenosine in mice's basal forebrain, a key part of the brain that regulates sleep/awakening.
observed suggest that neuron activity is closely related to changes in adenosine concentrations.
In this way, the team led by Researcher Xu Min further used techniques such as calcium imaging and photogenetics to find two types of neurons responsible for regulating adenosine release in the pre-base brain region: acetylcholine-energy neurons and glutamate-energy neurons.
and for the first time, the activity of glutamate-energy neurons is the main cause of extracellular adenosine accumulation.
, if these glutamate neurons do not work, reduce the accumulation of adenosine, can reduce distress? To test this guess, the researchers managed to destroy glutamate-energy neurons in the frontal brain region of the mouse substrate.
found that the mice's waking hours increased significantly.
the control group, the mice slept 20 percent less throughout the day and were almost completely sleepy throughout the night (for them, the equivalent of a human day).
these results, the researchers note that glutamate-energy neurons in the frontal brain region of the brain's substrate play an important role in the accumulation of distress during prolonged waking.
these neurons both maintain and promote awakening and increase distress by stimulating adenosine release.
although for now, researchers have used only traumatic interventions to regulate sleep, this group of neurons offers a potential target that may be used in the future to treat sleep-related problems.
Perhaps in the near future, scientists based their findings on the ability to develop a new drug or simple intervention that allows us to regulate our sleep time more flexibly and avoid the dangers of sleep deprivation.
surely a boon for those who want to spend more time.
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