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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 25 2019, @01:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the under-pressure dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Settling the debate on serotonin's role in sleep: The brain chemical is necessary to get enough sleep

Serotonin is a multipurpose molecule found throughout the brain, playing a role in memory, cognition, and feelings of happiness and other emotions. In particular, researchers have long debated serotonin's role in sleep: Does serotonin promote sleep, or its opposite, wakefulness?

Now, Caltech scientists have found that serotonin is necessary for sleep in zebrafish and mouse models.

A paper describing the research appears online on June 24 in the journal Neuron. The work is a collaboration between the Caltech laboratories of David Prober, professor of biology and affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech; and Viviana Gradinaru (BS '05), professor of neuroscience and biological engineering, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, and director of the Chen Institute's Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience.

Previous studies on serotonin and sleep have yielded conflicting results. Some research showed that serotonin promotes sleep, but other work showed that serotonin-producing neurons were most active and releasing the chemical during wakefulness.

In order to settle this debate, the Caltech team focused on a region called the raphe nuclei, which has the brain's main population of serotonin-producing (or serotonergic) neurons. The raphe are evolutionarily ancient structures found in the brain stem of a wide range of organisms from fish to humans, and they are responsible for both manufacturing and sending out serotonin to other brain regions.

[...] "The theory is that, in order to sleep, you need to have high sleep pressure and the circadian clock needs to be aligned with the time of day -- nighttime for diurnal creatures like us and daytime for nocturnal animals."

The researchers theorize that the firing of neurons in the raphe and their release of serotonin is a way for the brain to build up sleep pressure. Indeed, they found that zebrafish lacking serotonin as well as mice with ablated raphe show reduced sleep pressure.

While the studies were in animal models, the raphe region and its production of serotonin are similar in human brains. The research can contribute to explanations of some sleep-related side effects of common antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin levels in the brain.

Grigorios Oikonomou, Michael Altermatt, Rong-wei Zhang, Gerard M. Coughlin, Christin Montz, Viviana Gradinaru, David A. Prober. The Serotonergic Raphe Promote Sleep in Zebrafish and Mice. Neuron, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.05.038


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:23PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:23PM (#859858)

    more complex than a Zebrafish.

    Large quantities of Seratonin by itself won't put you to sleep - it will cause you to clench your jaw uncontrollably.

    All things in balance, and since we're all out of balance one way or another, it's going to take a very large study, in humans, to answer questions like these in any valuable way.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @01:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @01:37AM (#859954)

    Large studies are just brute force. Newton figured out gravity using 9 planets and an apple.

  • (Score: 1) by grumpcuss on Wednesday June 26 2019, @03:29AM (1 child)

    by grumpcuss (7155) on Wednesday June 26 2019, @03:29AM (#859980)

    Large quantities of serotonin, in the dark, will be converted to large quantities of melatonin, which will put you to sleep. These putzes appear to have completely ignored the serotonin - melatonin conversion, which is well known. If they want to understand the role of serotonin in sleep, they need to start there, and look at the interplay between serotonin during wakefulness and melatonin during sleep and the onset of sleep. This makes me question the competence of these researchers.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:28AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:28AM (#860049)

      I've noticed that lots of neuroscience researchers like to focus on a particular brain structure, in this case the raphe nuclei, which, I believe, is a strategy to get their papers referenced by other researchers who might do anything at all with the raphe nuclei, or whatever other specific brain region - usually ones that don't have a ton of existing research published.

      If they published about the well known seratonin - melatonin conversion, they'd risk their peer review dismissing them as obvious and well established (something that peer reviewers need to f right off about, because replication of results is more important than one-off "novel discoveries" with insufficient data to draw solid conclusions, but, I digress)... even if they also studied the raphe nuclei responses, they'd be risking the 7 second review of their abstract missing that point and being dismissed as "just another replication of well established..." This way, they have a chance of becoming a primary reference for the raphe nuclei, elevating their stature in the literature to "highly referenced" and increasing their competitive standing for desirable postings at prestigious academic institutions...

      Assuming civilization survives well enough to preserve the academic literature of this century into the next millennium it will make a quaint meta-analysis to disentangle all the B.S. demagoguery and houses of cards built on flimsy conclusions in the all too human quest to become the next great trailblazing discoverer of X, instead of looking back at A, B, and C and really getting to the bottom of what's going on there.

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