A single pair of neurons links sleep to memory consolidation in Drosophila melanogaster

By Paula Haynes, B. Christmann, Leslie C. Griffith. 2015

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sleep promotes memory consolidation in humans and many other species, but the physiological and anatomical relationships between sleep and memory remain unclear. Here, we show the dorsal paired medial (DPM) neurons, which are required for memory consolidation in Drosophila, are sleep-promoting inhibitory neurons. DPMs increase sleep via release of GABA onto wake-promoting mushroom body (MB) α'/β' neurons. Functional imaging demonstrates that DPM activation evokes robust increases in chloride in MB neurons, but is unable to cause detectable increases in calcium or cAMP. Downregulation of α'/β' GABAA and GABABR3 receptors results in sleep loss, suggesting these receptors are the sleep-relevant targets of DPM-mediated inhibition. Regulation of sleep by neurons necessary for consolidation suggests that these brain processes may be functionally interrelated via their shared anatomy. These findings have important implications for the mechanistic relationship between sleep and memory consolidation, arguing for a significant role of inhibitory neurotransmission in regulating these processes. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03868.001

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

1. Yoshinori Aso
2. Gerald M. Rubin
3. Glenn C. Turner
4. Toshihide Hige
5. M. Nitabach
6. Xin Jin
7. M. Felix
8. N. Chen

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Glenn C. Turner
2. Gerald M. Rubin
3. Yoshinori Aso

In Endocrine and Autonomic Systems

1. Gerald M. Rubin
2. Yoshinori Aso

Citations in the corpus

• Dopaminergic neurons write and update memories with cell-type-specific rules (2016, background): “Recent work has shown that the g2a01 compartments play key roles in both sleep regulation and long-term memory (Sitaraman et al., 2015; Haynes et al., 2015).”
• Modelling learning and memory in Drosophila to understand Intellectual Disabilities. (2020, unknown): “, 2018), sleep and activity cycles (Pitman et al., 2006; Guo et al., 2011; Haynes et al., 2015; Sitaraman et al., 2015) and decision making (DasGupta et al.”
• Propagation of homeostatic sleep signals by segregated synaptic microcircuits of the Drosophila mushroom body (2015, methodology): “Tap-Response Arousal Assay We probed the quiescence induced by activation of sleep promoting neuron by dTRPA1 by tapping vials housing flies as previously described [7].”
• A connectome of a learning and memory center in the adult Drosophila brain (2017, background): “…DPM neuron is immunoreactive to the amnesiac neuropeptide (Waddell et al., 2000) and has been proposed to use serotonin (Lee et al., 2011) and GABA (Haynes et al., 2015) as neurotransmitters; its role in the circuit is less clear, but it is gap-junctionally coupled to APL (Wu et al., 2011), and…”