Back

Cell-specific effects of acute sleep deprivation on transcriptomic signatures of non-neuronal cells in the mouse hippocampus and prefrontal cortex

Kasuya, J.; Wang, Y.; Vanrobaeys, Y.; Frank, M. G.; Abel, T.

2026-02-03 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.01.29.702391 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Sleep is essential for maintaining cognitive, emotional, metabolic, and immune functions. Although research on sleep homeostasis is traditionally neuron-centric, increasing evidence indicates non-neuronal cells also play critical roles. In this study, we performed transcriptomic analyses of non-neuronal nuclei from the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of mice subjected to acute sleep deprivation (SD). We found that acute SD induces robust, cell-type- and region-specific transcriptional reprogramming in astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. The most pronounced changes occurred in astrocytes, including downregulation of cholesterol biosynthesis genes in both brain regions, accompanied by region-specific and opposing regulation of genes involved in mitochondrial function and neurodegeneration-related pathways. Notably, genes associated with primary cilia were selectively induced in cortical astrocytes. In oligodendrocytes, acute SD led to downregulation of genes encoding cell-adhesion molecules. Together, these findings provide molecular evidence that non-neuronal cells actively contribute to sleep regulation and suggest novel potential mechanisms that broaden our understanding of sleep homeostasis.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.