“This brings cellular resolution to a question that’s ancient”, namely what is the purpose of sleep and how is it linked to memory, says girlsinscience_.
L’Etoile and her colleagues wanted to investigate whether this also applied to. Studying sleep in such a simple organism “might help us to really understand the underlying mechanism”, says Hanna Zwaka, a neuroscientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We know their individual synapses, and that's something that we don't have in other animals.”
While napping, “the little worms become straight with just a little crook where their head is”, says L’Etoile. Although they tend not to move around, the worms can’t resist sleep eating. “Their feeding is reduced, but it’s not zero,” she says.Memories are thought to reside in synapses — the junctions between neurons.
The worms detect the odour of butanone using a neuron called AWC, which connects to a pair of neurons called AIY. Using an imaging tool called GRASP to elicit green fluorescence at synapses, the authors showed that training the worms to avoid the odour caused a reduction in the number of AWC–AIY synapses in their nervous system.
The worms that enjoyed uninterrupted sleep immediately after the odour training did not react to the smell of butanone after 16 hours. But the ones deprived of sleep in the first 1–2 hours after training showed more-intense synaptic connections than did those with undisturbed sleep, and didn’t remember to stay away from butanone after 16 hours.
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