Abnormal Locus Coeruleus Sleep Activity Alters Sleep Signatures of Memory Consolidation and Impairs Place Cell Stability and Spatial Memory.

Sleep is critical for proper memory consolidation. The locus coeruleus (LC) releases norepinephrine throughout the brain except when the LC falls silent throughout rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and prior to each non-REM (NREM) sleep spindle. We hypothesize that these transient LC silences allow the synaptic plasticity that is necessary to incorporate new information into pre-existing memory circuits.

Different Simultaneous Sleep States in the Hippocampus and Neocortex.

Study Objectives: Investigators assign sleep-waking states using brain activity collected from a single site, with the assumption that states occur at the same time throughout the brain. We sought to determine if sleep-waking states differ between two separate structures: the hippocampus and neocortex.

Methods: We measured electrical signals (electroencephalograms and electromyograms) during sleep from the hippocampus and neocortex of five freely behaving adult male rats.

Stress-free automatic sleep deprivation using air puffs.

Background: Sleep deprivation via gentle handling is time-consuming and personnel-intensive.

New Method: We present here an automated sleep deprivation system via air puffs. Implanted EMG and EEG electrodes were used to assess sleep/waking states in six male Sprague-Dawley rats.

Open-source logic-based automated sleep scoring software using electrophysiological recordings in rats.

Manual state scoring of physiological recordings in sleep studies is time-consuming, resulting in a data backlog, research delays and increased personnel costs. We developed MATLAB-based software to automate scoring of sleep/waking states in rats, potentially extendable to other animals, from a variety of recording systems. The software contains two programs, Sleep Scorer and Auto-Scorer, for manual and automated scoring.

Electroporation-induced cell lysis in SWLA-2 hybridomas.

This paper describes experimental results involving the percentage cell lysis in SWLA-2 murine hybridomas produced by square wave electric field pulses of 100, 200, and 300 V across a 1 mm gap width in a standard cuvette. Pulse lengths were of 0.2 and 0.

BioMEMs.

This session is intended to provide insight into the development of BioMEMS in the academic and industrial settings and address the current challenges facing R&D. Each speaker will address the field of bioMEMS and collaborations between academia and industry from his point-of-view and provide examples of developmental successes and failures in his setting. The speakers will also submit potential solutions to the organizational problems they presently face and foresee in the future.