Exploring the mechanisms involved in sleep-dependent memory storage, a team of University of Michigan (U-M) cellular biologists found that RNAs associated with an understudied cell compartment in hippocampal neurons vary greatly between sleeping and sleep-deprived mice after learning.
Sara Aton, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and James Delorme, a recent U-M neuroscience graduate student, hypothesized that both a learning event and subsequent sleep (or sleep loss) would impact mRNA translation. Most prior work on the effects of sleep on mRNAs have focused on transcripts in the neuronal cytosol. However, Drs. Aton and Delorme found that after learning, major changes in RNAs are instead present — almost exclusively — on ribosomes associated with neuronal cell membranes. These results have been published in the Proceedings of…
