City life as a student becomes overwhelming with the frequent
all-nighters, sacrificing a good night’s sleep to cram for that test or adding
the finishing touches to a project. We always say that we’ll catch up on lost
sleep, but then the next assignment comes along. Achieving a full night’s sleep
is becoming more and more difficult for students. We’re staying up later and
struggling to wake up the next morning. Our bodies become so accustomed to this
cycle, that the only way to break it is to get away- and what better way to restore
those circadian rhythms than a weekend camping out under an open sky without burden
of light pollution?
Cavanaugh and colleagues (2016) administered a study to test
for particular proteins and neurons involved in the circadian rhythm maintenance
in Drosophila. They found that a
neuron known as 201y-GAL4 activated by protein kinase A is responsible for the
sleep inducing behavior integrated within our circadian cycle. After
investigating what proteins were involved in producing this sleep-promoting
effect, Cavanaugh and colleagues found that there are subsets within the
201y-GAL4 fly neuron known as an alpha/beta core mushroom body (MB) as well as
a non MB subset. Through the various patterns of inhibition and studies with
these subsets of the 201y-GAL4 neuron, Cavanaugh and colleagues observed that
the non MB subset is responsible for the sleep-promoting effect. This effect
directly correlates with time of day, indicating that the presence of light
must be involved in the activation and inactivation of this gene.
This study demonstrates the inhibitory effects on sleep at
particular times of the day, suggesting that exposure to stimuli preventing
sleep is something that results in habituation of sleep patterns and an
altering of the circadian response to sleep. In the hustle and bustle of our
life, we see that our circadian clocks are shifting so that we are up during
the dark hours of the night and sleeping through the bright hours of the
morning. Emens (2017) discusses the property of electric light and its impact
on our sleep cycles. He finds that our exposure to electric light; whether in
the form of television screens, city lights, or tablets, affects our melatonin
cycle, a cycle important in the regulation of desire to sleep. As melatonin
levels increase, the drive to sleep is higher. As our circadian clock shifts,
our melatonin reactions to light also shift. In our world, we are constantly
exposed to the need for electric light, influencing the trend of falling asleep
later in the night regardless of the lack of light. Emens suggests that a
weekend camping trip under nothing, but natural light could serve to reset our
circadian rhythms through melatonin response to light. Using nothing but
natural light inhibits us from staying up all night because the absence of electric
light means our 201y-GAL4 neurons properly respond to conditions of the day. It’s
dark, we might as well sleep.
References:
Cavanaugh, D.J., Vigderman, B.S.,
Dean, T., Garbe, D.S., & Sehgal, A. (2016). The drosophila circadian clock
gates sleep through time-of-day dependence modulation of sleep-promoting
neurons. Sleep, 39, 345-356. doi:
10.5665/sleep.5442
Emens, J.S. (2017). Circadian
rhythms: The price of electric light. Current
Biology, 27, R144-R145. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.01.014
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