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July 13, 2018
Traveling by plane opened the door to experience different cultures and explore natural wonders. That is, if you can spend the time difference.
But what if you could take control of the brain's daily timing system? Biologists at the University of Washington in Saint Louis have discovered a cure for jet lag in mice by activating a small subset of neurons involved in the development of daily rhythms, as reported by Neuron in a publication. online July 12th. highly synchronized with the local time by the daily body clock, or circadian. A small dot at the bottom of the brain near the roof of the mouth reminds us to wake up and go to bed at a regular time every day. This master clock is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN.
When this system is disturbed -; shift work or time zone, for example -; the 20,000 SCN neurons struggle to adapt the body to the new schedule. The researchers found that stimulating only 10% of these neurons to trigger with the right pattern of electrical activity meant that the mice moved quickly to the new daily schedule.
"Just as your watch is good for keeping time." Erik Herzog, a professor of biology in the arts and sciences, "we wondered how the body's clock fits in its time local. "
Herzog and his laboratory suspected a small subset of SCN neurons are involved because he produces a vasoactive intestinal polypeptide or VIP, an essential compound that neurons use to communicate and synchronize their daily rhythms with each other [19659003] "We hypothesized that VIP neurons are like grandmothers who are responsible for telling everyone what to do." Herzog said. To test this idea, Cristina Mazuski, a former graduate student at Herzog Laboratory, first developed a way to characterize the normal daily fire patterns of VIP neurons.
By recording the action potentials of a millisecond from a set of neurons, they were able to identify two clbades of VIP neurons. Tonic VIP neurons fired at a steady rate with spaced intervals between each firing episode and VIP irregular neurons drawn in doublets or triplets with spaced intervals spaced after each doublet or triplet.
The researchers then tested whether the activation of VIP neurons
To conduct the experiment, the researchers kept the mice in total darkness all day and all night without any environmental indication as to time. Using a tool called optogenetics, they activated only VIP neurons at the same time each day, a procedure that imitated flying to a new time zone.
"This was an important step in understanding how SCR keeps organisms synchronized." Researchers found that mice survived jet lag more quickly when VIP neurons were activated for irregular fire. The mice were slower to adapt to the new local time when their VIP neurons were excited with tonic motives.
"We found that the irregular pattern causes the VIP release by VIP neurons," Herzog said. "VIP, we think, is the juice that is able to move the clock faster."
"We are really beginning to understand how the synchronization system in the brain is plugged together, and found that the code used by VIP neurons is in the future, the researchers hope to learn ways of" looking at ". encourage VIP neurons to release their VIP in order to choose the clock lock and reduce the time difference for human travelers and shift workers 19659018] Source:
https://source.wustl.edu/ 2018/07 / vip-neurons-hold-master-key-to-jet-lag-response /
