Neural circuits underlying sleep and emotional regulation

January 10

Noon – 1:00 p.m. PST

Where

SCCRS 250 and via Zoom

Meeting ID: 923 5507 9987
Passcode: 821370

About the speaker and seminar:

Shinjae Chung, PhD, Assistant Professor in Department of Neuroscience, Chronobiology Program, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, will be giving the Translational Medicine and Physiology’s seminar entitled “Neural circuits underlying sleep and emotional regulation”.

Good quality sleep is essential for our well-being. Sleep disturbances can therefore negatively impact our mental and physical health. We show that acute psychosocial stress in mice disrupts sleep, by causing frequent arousals, disrupting slow (~minute) oscillations in the electroencephalogram and suppressing REMs. These changes were reflected in frequent activation of noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus (LC-NE) during NREMs. Activating LC-NE neurons disrupted the sleep quality similar to stress, while inhibiting them after stress improved sleep partially through their projections to the preoptic area, a crucial sleep center. Our study reveals that LC-NE neurons and their interactions with hypothalamic sleep neurons orchestrate the sleep microarchitecture and play a crucial role in mediating the negative impact of stress on sleep.

View lab website: https://chunglab.med.upenn.edu/