Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Study uses transcriptomics and in vivo RNAi follow-up to explore sleep

Tomita J, Ueno T, Mitsuyoshi M, Kume S, Kume K. The NMDA Receptor Promotes Sleep in the Fruit Fly, Drosophila melanogaster. PLoS One. 2015 May 29;10(5):e0128101. PMID: 26023770; PMCID: PMC4449117.  

From the abstract: "... sleep is essential for learning and memory. Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a novel model for studying sleep. ... we carried out a microarray analysis comparing mRNA expression in heads of fmn and control flies and found that 563 genes are differentially expressed. Next, using the pan-neuronal Gal4 driver elav-Gal4 and UAS-RNA interference (RNAi) to knockdown individual genes, we performed a functional screen. We found that knockdown of the NMDA type glutamate receptor channel gene (Nmdar1) (also known as dNR1) reduced sleep. ..."

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