Volume 17, Number 24,
Issue of December 15, 1997
pp. 9746-9750
Effects of Sleep on Wake-Induced c-fos Expression
Received Aug. 11, 1997; revised Oct. 1, 1997; accepted Oct. 7, 1997.
Radhika Basheer1,
Jonathan E. Sherin2,
Clifford B. Saper2,
James
I. Morgan3,
Robert W. McCarley1, and
Priyattam J. Shiromani1
1 VA Medical Center and Harvard Medical School,
Brockton, Massachusetts 02401, 2 Department of Neurology,
Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, and
3 Department of Developmental Neurobiology, St. Jude
Children Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee 38105
We investigated the effects of sleep on wake-induced
c-fos expression in the cerebral cortex of rats and
c-fos-lacZ transgenic mice. In the cortex of rats, the
levels of c-Fos, detected both by immunocytochemistry and Western blot,
remained high during 6 or 12 hr of enforced wakefulness but declined
rapidly (within 1 hr) with increasing time of recovery sleep.
Similarly, in the transgenic mice in which lacZ
expression is driven from the c-fos promoter,
-galactosidase activity was high after enforced wakefulness and
declined with increasing amounts of sleep. These results suggest that
the decrease in c-Fos protein in cortical neurons during sleep may be
attributable to cessation of c-fos expression,
activation of a process that degrades the wake-induced c-Fos, or
both.
Key words:
sleep;
c-fos expression;
c-fos-lacZ
transgenic mice;
cingulate cortex;
immunohistochemistry;
Western blot;
-gal activity