Circadian rhythms and sleep articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hypothalamic neurons expressing melanin-concentrating-hormone (MCH) maintain body weight by orchestrating behaviour and metabolism, but little is known about their intrinsic regulation. Here, Gonzalez and colleagues reveal their behaviour-related dynamics during wakefulness, and map their brain-wide neural inputs.

    • J. Antonio González
    • , Panagiota Iordanidou
    •  & Denis Burdakov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    BK potassium channels have been previously shown to mediate SCN circadian firing, although the precise mechanisms are unclear. Here, using knockout and rescue approaches, the authors find that the ß2 ‘ball-and-chain’ confers BK channel inactivation during the day, promoting SCN electrical upstate.

    • Joshua P. Whitt
    • , Jenna R. Montgomery
    •  & Andrea L. Meredith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dreaming occurs in REM sleep, yet the neural mechanisms involved in generating it are not understood. Here Cox and colleagues show that glutamatergic neurons in the dorsal pons are activated most during transition to REM sleep while GABAergic neurons are more active during waking state.

    • Julia Cox
    • , Lucas Pinto
    •  & Yang Dan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Food anticipation is thought to be initiated by the central clock in the brain. Here the authors show that the peripheral organs initiate this process by showing that liver-specific deletion of Per2 can inhibit food anticipation by interfering with ß-hydroxybutyrate production and its subsequent processing in the brain.

    • Rohit Chavan
    • , Céline Feillet
    •  & Urs Albrecht

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mammalian basal forebrain controls cortical rhythm and wake-sleep. Anaclet et al.use genetically-targeted chemogenetic systems to activate or inhibit cholinergic, glutamatergic or GABAergic neurons in this region, and reveal their contributions to behavioral and electrocortical arousal in behaving mice.

    • Christelle Anaclet
    • , Nigel P. Pedersen
    •  & Patrick M. Fuller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exposure to memory cues during sleep improves subsequent memory recall. Here the authors demonstrate that presenting an additional auditory stimulus during a critical time window following the memory cue abolishes the memory benefit of cueing and its oscillatory correlates during sleep in humans.

    • Thomas Schreiner
    • , Mick Lehmann
    •  & Björn Rasch

  • Article |

    How can you increase the success of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation? In mice, Rolls et al. identify sleep in the donor as an important factor, finding that less sleep leads to 50% lower HSC engraftment, via miR-19b and suppressor of cytokine signaling genes, which prevent HSC homing.

    • Asya Rolls
    • , Wendy W. Pang
    •  & Luis de Lecea

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Since the discovery of rapid eye movements (REMs), a critical question endures as to whether they represent time points at which visual-like processing is updated. Here the authors demonstrate that cortical activity during sleep REMs shares many properties with that observed during saccades and vision.

    • Thomas Andrillon
    • , Yuval Nir
    •  & Itzhak Fried

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In adults, oscillatory brain activity during sleep is related to memory consolidation. Here, the authors measure brain activity from infants who are exposed to novel word meanings, and show that infant sleep results in the retention and reorganization of recently encoded memories.

    • Manuela Friedrich
    • , Ines Wilhelm
    •  & Angela D. Friederici

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The earth’s electromagnetic field has a modest effect on the behaviour of Drosophila melanogaster. Here, Fedele et al. use an assessment of climbing behaviour to describe how the blue-light circadian photoreceptor cryptochrome mediates a negative movement response to gravity in flies.

    • Giorgio Fedele
    • , Edward W. Green
    •  & Charalambos P. Kyriacou

  • Article |

    Sleep is implicated in consolidating procedural skills. Here, Song and Cohen train subjects on a repeating sequence of key-presses and show that practice contributes to transitional information-based aspects of skill whereas sleep contributes to ordinal information-based aspects of skill.

    • Sunbin Song
    •  & Leonardo G. Cohen

  • Article |

    The Caenorhabditis elegans neuropeptide NLP-22 is regulated by a larval circadian clock that is similar to circadian clocks in mammals. Nelson et al. show that NLP-22, expressed in Caenorhabditis elegansRIA interneurons, regulates a sleep-like behavioural quiescence.

    • M.D. Nelson
    • , N.F. Trojanowski
    •  & D.M. Raizen

  • Article |

    The transcription factor p53 is a master regulator of the cellular stress response. Here, Miki et al.show that p53 directly regulates the expression of the circadian regulator Per2 in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and modulates circadian behaviour of mice.

    • Takao Miki
    • , Tomoko Matsumoto
    •  & Cheng Chi Lee

  • Article |

    Insufficient sleep is a known risk factor for obesity. Greeret al.show that sleep deprivation amplifies mesolimbic brain responses to food stimuli, yet impairs activity in higher cortical areas, which, together, are associated with an increased desire for high-calorie food items.

    • Stephanie M. Greer
    • , Andrea N. Goldstein
    •  & Matthew P. Walker

  • Article |

    Humans are a network of complex physiological systems, but quantifying these diverse systems is a challenge. This study presents a method to show that each physiological state is characterized by a specific network structure, demonstrating a connection between network topology and function.

    • Amir Bashan
    • , Ronny P. Bartsch
    •  & Plamen Ch. Ivanov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Circadian rhythm is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the mechanisms that control the rhythm are largely undiscovered. In this study, a G protein regulator, RGS16, is shown to be involved in the production of cyclic AMP that is required for the suprachiasmatic nucleus to maintain rhythm

    • Masao Doi
    • , Atsushi Ishida
    •  & Hitoshi Okamura

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