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Stop Snoring Week Sleeping Cells
25 April 2016

Sleeping Cells

Sleep, or as Shakespeare put it "nature’s soft nurse", is a vital function necessary for our overall health and well-being. Sleeping plays an important role in brain development, strengthening connections that have been made by neurons during the day and solidifying memories. Over our lifetime, our sleep duration changes, and the molecular details of how this is regulated are still mainly unknown. But by studying mice with abnormal sleep patterns, researchers have identified multiple genes important for regulating sleep duration, and which also allow changes in calcium molecules to take place in mice brain cells (neurons). They also found that by impairing calcium receptors in neurons, the neurons became excited and active (shown in brighter green on the right). This caused calcium molecules to flow out of the neurons and ‘wake the mice up’, whereas opposite calcium flow, into the neurons (left), caused the mice to fall asleep .

Today is the start of the UK's National Stop Snoring Week

Written by Katie Panteli

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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