간행물

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국내/외 연구실 소개

Laboratory for neural circuits controlling sleep

  • 작성자

    정신재 (University of Pennsylvania)
  • 작성일자

    2024-12-17
  • 조회수

    435

Laboratory for neural circuits controlling sleep

 

정신재 (Shinjae Chung)

University of Pennsylvania

 

[연구실소개 및 연구내용]

 

Good quality sleep is essential for our mental health. Patients suffering from chronic stress or psychiatric disorders are often plagued by disrupted or insufficient sleep, and disturbed sleep has been shown to increase the risk of developing psychiatric disorders suggesting that the neural circuits controlling sleep are tightly inter-connected with circuits involved in emotional regulation and psychiatric disorders.

 

The goal of our lab is to identify the molecular and neural mechanisms controlling sleep and sleep homeostasis, and to understand how these are interconnected with the neural circuits regulating emotional states in health and disease. To accomplish this, we employ a multi-disciplinary approach: (A) Optogenetic and pharmacogenetic manipulation to examine the impact of cell type specific manipulation on sleep and behaviors. (B) In vivo electrophysiology, deep brain imaging and fiber photometry to observe dynamic changes of neural activity in sleeping and behaving mice. (C) Circuit mapping using viral tools to comprehensively identify the synaptic inputs and outputs of a genetically defined neural population. (D) Gene profiling to identify novel molecular markers of sleep neurons and to understand how the genetic signature of newly identified sleep neurons are influenced by behaviors.

 

My lab has three main directions : 1) We aim to reveal how the neural dynamics and functional connectivity of preoptic neurons in the hypothalamus with stress-regulatory neurons regulate the duration and quality of sleep after stress. The results will provide a comprehensive framework enhancing our understanding of the regulation of sleep when disturbed by stress and the benefits of improving sleep in attenuating stress-related cognitive symptoms. 2) Sleep during development is critical for brain maturation and shaping cognitive functions in adulthood. Our goal is to elucidate the neural circuit mechanisms by which sleep quantity and continuity during adolescence impacts cognition and hippocampal network in adulthood. The results will enhance our understanding of the causal relationships between adolescent sleep disturbances and adult cognitive functioning, and the benefits of improving sleep during development to attenuate cognitive deficits in the mouse model of neurodevelopmental disorder. 3) Sleep disturbances impair our cognitive abilities and precede the onset of cognitive symptoms in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep restriction compromises immunity that have detrimental effects on various brain functions, including our cognitive abilities. Our goal is to elucidate how sleep deprivation undermines the immune system and subsequently compromises distinct neural circuits regulating cognitive functions in health and neurodegenerative conditions.

 

[연구책임자]

 


 

정신재 조교수

Department of Neuroscience

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia PA 19104

shinjaec@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

https://chunglab.med.upenn.edu/

 

[연구진구성] 

 


 

Shinjae Chung 

Bowon Kim, Alyssa Wiest, Joe Stucynski, Ellie Labriola, Marc Lubman, Sydney Liu

 

[대표논문] 

 

1. Antila H, Kwak I, Choi A, Pisciotti A, Covarrubias I, Baik J, Eisch A, Beier K, Thomas S, Weber F, Chung S. A noradrenergic-hypothalamic neural substrate for stress-induced sleep disturbances.     Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2022; 119(45): e2123528119. 

2. Smith J, Honig-Frand A, Antila H, Beier K, Weber F, Chung S. Regulation of stress-induced sleep fragmentation by preoptic glutamatergic neurons. Current Biology. 2024; 34: 1-12. 

3. Maurer J, Lin A, Jin X, Hong J, Sathi N, Cardis R, Osorio-Forero A, Lüthi A, Weber, F, Chung S. Homeostatic regulation of REM sleep by the preoptic area of the hypothalamus. eLife, 2024; 12: RP92095. 

4. Chung S, Weber F, Zhong P, Tan CL, Nguyen TN, Beier KT, Hörmann N, Chang WC, Zhang Z, Do JP, Yao S. Krashes MJ, Tasic B, Cetin A, Zeng H, Knight ZA, Luo L, Dan Y. Identification of preoptic sleep neurons using retrograde labelling and gene profiling. Nature. 2017;545(7655):477-81.