A team of neurobiologists at Brown University and several other institutions has now found that "Notch," a fundamental signaling pathway found in all animals, is directly involved in sleep in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.
"This pathway is a major player in development across all animal species," said Anne Hart, associate professor of neuroscience at Brown. "The fact that this highly conserved pathway regulates how much these little animals sleep strongly suggests that it’s going to play a critical role in other animals, including humans. The genes in this pathway are expressed in the human brain."
The work, to be published May 24 in the journal Current Biology, offers new insights into what controls sleep. The lead authors are Komudi Singh, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University, and Michael Chao, a previous member of the Hart laboratory, who is now an associate professor at California State University–San Bernardino.
"We understand sleep as little as we understand consciousness," said Hart, the paper’s senior author. "We’re not clear why sleep is required, how animals enter into a sleep state, how sleep is maintained, or how animals wake up. We’re still trying to figure out what is critical at the cellular level and the molecular level."
Ultimately, Hart added, researchers could use that knowledge to develop more precise and safer sleep aids.
