Circadian rhythms and sleep articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The genus Drosophila originate in subSaharan Africa and spread North up to the polar circle where they experience long days in the summer or even constant light. Here, the authors show that a form of the TIMELESS protein enables flies to synchronise their behavioural activity to long summer days

    • Angelique Lamaze
    • , Chenghao Chen
    •  & Ralf Stanewsky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although ubiquitin ligases are known to control clock protein degradation, their other roles in clock neurons are unclear. Here the authors report that UBR4 promotes export of neuropeptides from the Golgi for axonal trafficking, which is important for circadian clock synchrony in mice and flies.

    • Sara Hegazi
    • , Arthur H. Cheng
    •  & Hai-Ying Mary Cheng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A key property of circadian rhythms is that they can be reset in response to environmental time cues; this response is described by a Phase Response Curve (PRC). Here the authors describe PRCs for resetting circadian rhythms in lipids and hepatic proteins in response to combined light and food exposure.

    • Brianne A. Kent
    • , Shadab A. Rahman
    •  & Steven W. Lockley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using large-scale recordings from cortical and subcortical brain regions in behaving mice, the authors reveal the presence of a respiratory corollary discharge in mice, that modulates neural activity across these circuits and couples hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and cortical DOWN/UP state transitions.

    • Nikolaos Karalis
    •  & Anton Sirota

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The molecular mechanism by which clock neurons transmit timing information to non-clock neurons is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that circadian clocks drive rhythmic expression of hundreds of genes in mushroom body neurons and drive calcium rhythms via NF1-cAMP/PKAC1 signalling in Drosophila.

    • Pedro Machado Almeida
    • , Blanca Lago Solis
    •  & Emi Nagoshi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The first known portal system in the mammalian brain was identified in 1933. Here the authors describe a new portal system between the capillary beds of the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus master clock and a circumventricular organ, enabling humoral signals to reach targets without dilution in the systemic circulation.

    • Yifan Yao
    • , Alana B’nai Taub
    •  & Rae Silver

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The preoptic area (POA) is critical for sleep regulation but its role in acute, non-circadian, light effects on sleep are unclear. The authors show that intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells provide substantial input into the POA and through these modulate the amount of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep.

    • Ze Zhang
    • , Corinne Beier
    •  & Samer Hattar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors show that microglia depletion results in unstable wakefulness and altered levels of ceramide, influencing microglia in the mouse thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). Stable wakefulness can be restored by activation of the TRN or inhibition of ceramide production in the mouse brain.

    • Hanxiao Liu
    • , Xinxing Wang
    •  & Qiaojie Xiong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sleep is known to promote memory consolidation, but the extent to which this is dependent on the memory’s relevance remains unclear. Here, the authors use a brain decoding approach to show that neural representations of rewarded experiences undergo a privileged reactivation during sleep, favouring their consolidation.

    • Virginie Sterpenich
    • , Mojca K. M. van Schie
    •  & Sophie Schwartz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attentional lapses occur in many forms such as mind-wandering or mindblanking. Here the authors show different types of attentional lapse are accompanied by slow waves, neural activity that is characteristic of transitions into sleep.

    • Thomas Andrillon
    • , Angus Burns
    •  & Naotsugu Tsuchiya

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Circadian clocks link physiologic processes to environmental conditions and a mismatch between internal and external rhythms has negative effects on organismal health. In this review, the authors discuss the interactions between circadian clocks and dietary interventions targeted to promote healthy aging.

    • Victoria A. Acosta-Rodríguez
    • , Filipa Rijo-Ferreira
    •  & Joseph S. Takahashi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cardiac function fluctuates greatly across the day and night, but this is not simply a consequence of our changing behaviour. The authors highlight the role of the body’s circadian clock in regulating the heart electrical activity, including a time-of-day dependent susceptibility to cardiac arrhythmias.

    • Edward A. Hayter
    • , Sophie M. T. Wehrens
    •  & David A. Bechtold

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sleep pressure and circadian rhythms influence one another. However, the regulatory mechanisms are unclear. Here, the authors show that adenosine A1/A2A receptor antagonists, such as caffeine, shift circadian rhythms and enhance the effects of light, providing a molecular link between sleep pressure and circadian rhythm.

    • Aarti Jagannath
    • , Norbert Varga
    •  & Sridhar R. Vasudevan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite its wide and growing use, the mechanisms by which in vivo vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) exerts its therapeutic benefits are still largely unknown. Here, the authors show in mice that pupil dilation is a reliable and noninvasive biosensor for titratable VNS-evoked cortical neuromodulation by acetylcholine.

    • Zakir Mridha
    • , Jan Willem de Gee
    •  & Matthew James McGinley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The genetic basis of daytime napping and the directional effect of daytime napping on cardiometabolic health are unknown. Here, the authors perform a genome-wide association study on self-reported daytime napping in the UK Biobank and Mendelian randomization to explore causal associations.

    • Hassan S. Dashti
    • , Iyas Daghlas
    •  & Richa Saxena

  • Article
    | Open Access

    During NREM sleep, spindles emerge from thalamocortical interactions. Here the authors carry out multisite thalamic and cortical recordings in freely behaving mice, to investigate the role of other non-classical thalamic sites in sleep spindle generation.

    • Mojtaba Bandarabadi
    • , Carolina Gutierrez Herrera
    •  & Antoine R. Adamantidis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Glymphatic function is increased during the rest phase while more cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) drains directly to the lymphatic system during the active phase. The water channel aquaporin-4 supports these endogenous, circadian rhythms in CSF distribution.

    • Lauren M. Hablitz
    • , Virginia Plá
    •  & Maiken Nedergaard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Orexin signaling is provided by diffusely distributed fibers and involved in different brain circuits that orchestrate sleep and wakefulness states. Here, the authors show that a proportion of orexin neurons project to the sublaterodorsal tegmental nucleus and exhibit rapid eye movement (REM) sleep-related actions.

    • Hui Feng
    • , Si-Yi Wen
    •  & Jun Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Circadian activity modulation in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is a network-level emergent property that requires neuropeptide VIP signaling, yet the precise cellular mechanisms are unknown. Patton et al. show that cells expressing VIP or its receptor VPAC2 together determine these emergent properties of the SCN.

    • Andrew P. Patton
    • , Mathew D. Edwards
    •  & Michael H. Hastings

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in EEG delta-activity are widely used as proxy of sleep propensity. Here the authors demonstrate in mice and humans the presence of two types of delta-waves, only one of which reports on prior sleep-wake history with dynamics denoting a wake-inertia process accompanying deepest non-rapid-eye-movement sleep (NREM) sleep.

    • Jeffrey Hubbard
    • , Thomas C. Gent
    •  & Paul Franken

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dorsal raphe 5HT(DRSert) neurons regulate arousal from hypercapnia by their projections to the neurons in the external lateral parabrachial nucleus (PBel) that are glutamatergic and also express calcitonin gene related peptide (PBelCGRP). The DRSert input to the PBel modulates the arousal system to rising levels of blood CO2, and may be mediated by 5HT2a receptors on the PBelCGRP neurons.

    • Satvinder Kaur
    • , Roberto De Luca
    •  & Clifford B. Saper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Thalamic head direction (HD) cells are necessary to establish spatial maps in the hippocampus. Here, the authors show that HD cells tuned to a particular direction are coupled to individual hippocampal ripple events during sleep, suggesting an influence of the replay of specific trajectories during sleep memory consolidation.

    • Guillaume Viejo
    •  & Adrien Peyrache

  • Article
    | Open Access

    VIP-expressing neurons play a central role in circadian timekeeping within the mammalian central clock. Here the authors use opto- and chemogenetic approaches to show that VIP neuronal activity regulates rhythmic activity in downstream hypothalamic target neurons and their physiological functions.

    • Sarika Paul
    • , Lydia Hanna
    •  & Timothy M. Brown

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a sleep phase characterised by random eye movements for which the underlying motor commands are yet to be revealed. The authors describe that a cluster of medulla oblongata neurons in the Nucleus papiliocontributes to the control of eye movements during REM sleep.

    • C. Gutierrez Herrera
    • , F. Girard
    •  & M. R. Celio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    C. elegans sleep can be used to model neural state transitions. Here the authors show that adult C. elegans show quiescent sleep-like behavior when in a microfluidic chamber, and that this is regulated by temperature, mechanosensation and satiety.

    • Daniel L. Gonzales
    • , Jasmine Zhou
    •  & Jacob T. Robinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A main symptom of chronic insufficient sleep is excessive daytime sleepiness. Here, Wang et al. report 42 genome-wide significant loci for self-reported daytime sleepiness in 452,071 individuals from the UK Biobank that cluster into two biological subtypes of either sleep propensity or sleep fragmentation.

    • Heming Wang
    • , Jacqueline M. Lane
    •  & Richa Saxena

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sleep disturbance is common in psychiatric disease, and this may contribute to altered circadian rhythm in gene expression. Here the authors show that rhythms in gene expression in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia are different to that seen in healthy controls.

    • Marianne L. Seney
    • , Kelly Cahill
    •  & Colleen A. McClung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    NREM sleep in rodents is characterized by internal dynamics in the form of UP/DOWN states in the neocortex and SWRs in the hippocampus. Here, the authors report that a mean field model with excitable dynamics captures the transition probabilities between these states from rodent sleep data.

    • Daniel Levenstein
    • , György Buzsáki
    •  & John Rinzel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quality, quantity and timing of sleep are important factors for overall human health. Here, the authors perform GWAS for sleep traits estimated using wearable accelerometers and identify 47 genetic associations, including 26 novel associations for measures of sleep quality and 10 for nocturnal sleep duration.

    • Samuel E. Jones
    • , Vincent T. van Hees
    •  & Andrew R. Wood

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Do single neurons require sleep and what is the conserved cellular function of sleep? In this paper, the authors use real-time imaging of chromosomes in individual cells within live zebrafish to show that sleep increases chromosome dynamics, which are necessary to reduce DNA damage that is accumulated during wakefulness.

    • D. Zada
    • , I. Bronshtein
    •  & L. Appelbaum

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