Glia prevents locomotion during sleep

Glia prevents locomotion during sleep

A good night of sleep entails about eight hours of blissful immobility--a state of near paralysis that, though welcome at night, would be inconvenient during the day. In a paper published in Cell Reports, scientists shed new light on the transitions between a wakeful, active state and the stillness of sleep.

Through a series of experiments in the roundworm C. elegans, the researchers show that glial cells play an unexpected role in ensuring that worms don't suddenly succumb to sleep-associated immobility. It's the latest in a growing list of functions ascribed to glial cells, which were once thought to function solely as scaffolding for neurons, but are turning out to be sophisticated biological actors in their own right.

In C. elegans, a type of glial cell known as CEPsh glia surround neurons in the worm version of a brain, and are known to wrap around select synapses, the connections between neurons. Researchers took an interest in CEPsh cells because they seemed to share many features with astrocytes, star-shaped glial cells suspected by some scientists to regulate sleep in humans and other vertebrates.

To better understand the function of CEPsh glia, the team developed a line of C. elegans that lacked these cells,then monitored the tiny worms' movements. The scientists noticed that, often, the animals abruptly stopped in place for seconds to minutes at a time--an unusual behavior for this type of worm.

"We can watch C. elegans all day when they search for food, and we rarely see them stop. The worms lacking CEPsh glia were abnormal--they looked narcoleptic," says the author.




Researchers believe that ALA is responsible for their worms' apparent drowsiness. When they removed ALA neurons in C. elegans lacking CEPsh cells, these worms no longer displayed the odd behavior seen in previous trials: movement, sleep, and development returned to normal.

These findings suggest that, when CEPsh cells are absent, ALA inhibits AVE continuously, thereby impeding movement at inappropriate times. But CEPsh glia seem to counteract ALA neurons, permitting normal movement. "When the animal needs to be moving, the glia are important in making sure that AVE isn't listening to ALA," says the senior author.

Furthermore,researchers discovered that ALA inhibits movement without completely deactivating AVE, an usual decoupling of neuronal activity and motor output.

"We spend more than a third of our life asleep. But we don't really understand what it's good for, and we don't understand how it works," says the senior author. "In the worm, we've now shown that animals don't develop properly if sleep is messed up--and we've uncovered aspects of the underlying control processes. Given that sleep is so ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, our work may provide important general insights."