Grant: Operating Grant

All animals sleep; but formally speaking the functions of sleep are unknown. Correlative studies indicate that sleep, in particular slow-wave sleep is responsible for memory consolidation. Long-term synaptic plasticity plays a key role in memory. Current studies provide very controversial data on a role of sleep in synaptic plasticity. One group of studies explores a hypothesis that sleep induces synaptic downscaling. On the contrary, other studies indirectly demonstrate that sleep induces synaptic facilitation, and finally our recent work provided direct evidences that all richness of sleep slow oscillation was able to directly induce synaptic facilitation. In the proposed study we will test a hypothesis that differences in slow-wave sleep activities in different cortical areas would incur different extent of synaptic plasticity. Therefore, enhancing sleep slow-wave activities in different areas will improve learning to a different extent. Our preliminary data demonstrate that imposing slow oscillation to mice frontal cortex increases memory consolidation. The main objectives of the proposed study is to investigate area specific cellular dynamics of sleeping and waking states in mice, to demonstrate that these kind of activities induce synaptic facilitation and by imposing exact replica of sleep activities to mice after period of learning to increase its memory consolidation. This study will provide new approaches to improve learning abilities in general population and in patients with variable forms of amnesia.