Understudied brain cells may help us stay awake without negative effects

A new study has revealed that astrocytes, anunderstudied type of brain cells, play an important role in regulation of sleep loss. The study suggests that one day, humans will be able to go without sleep for long periods of timewithout bad effects such as reduced physical health and mental fatigue.

The study has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. News agency ANI has reported that the study found activating astrocytes kept mice awake for hours when normally they would be resting. And this did not make them sleepier.

“Extended wakefulness normally increases sleep time and intensity, but what we saw in this study was that despite hours of added wakefulness these mice did not differ from well-rested controls in terms of how long and how intensely they slept,” said senior author Marcos Frank, a neuroscientist and professor at the Washington State University Elson S Floyd College of Medicine.

“This opens up the possibility that we might someday have interventions that could target astrocytes to mitigate the negative consequences of prolonged wakefulness.”

Sleep loss or irregular sleep interferes with variety of processes like attention, cognition, learning memory and even immune function, metabolism.

Astrocytes are cells that interact with neurons. These are non-neuronal cells. Neurons transmit easily measured electrical signals from brain to other parts of the body.

Astrocytes were previously only thought to be the "glue" that holds the brain together. More recently, they have been found to play active role in behaviours and processes. They do so using a difficult-to-measure process known as calcium signalling.

This includes a previous WSU study that showed that suppressing astrocyte calcium signaling throughout the brain resulted in mice building up less sleep need after sleep deprivation.

In the current study, the researchers specifically looked at astrocytes that are present in the basal forebrain. This region of brain plays critical role in determining time spent asleep and awake as well as sleep needs.

“Our findings suggest that our need for sleep isn’t just a function of prior wake time but is also driven by these long-ignored non-neuronal cells,” said first author Ashley Ingiosi, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Ohio State University who conducted the study while working as a postdoctoral research associate in Frank’s lab at WSU.

“We can now start to pinpoint how astrocytes interact with neurons to trigger this response and how they drive the expression and regulation of sleep in different parts of the brain.”

(With inputs from agencies)

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