Energy Scarcity Promotes a Brain-wide Sleep State Modulated by Insulin Signaling in C. elegans

Summary Neural information processing entails a high energetic cost, but its maintenance is crucial for animal survival. However, the brain’s energy conservation strategies are incompletely understood. Employing functional brain-wide imaging and quantitative behavioral assays, we describe a neuronal strategy in Caenorhabditis elegans that balances energy availability and expenditure. Upon acute food deprivation, animals exhibit a transiently elevated state of arousal, indicated by foraging behaviors and increased responsiveness to food-related cues. In contrast, long-term starvation suppresses these behaviors and biases animals to intermittent sleep episodes. Brain-wide neuronal population dynamics, which are likely energetically costly but important for behavior, are robust to starvation while animals are awake. However, during starvation-induced sleep, brain dynamics are systemically downregulated. Neuromodulation via insulin-like signaling is required to transiently maintain the animals’ arousal state upon acute food deprivation. Our data suggest that the regulation of sleep and wakefulness supports optimal energy allocation.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Cell Reports

• Publication date

  2018-01-23

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.celrep.2017.12.091PMID 29386137PMCID 5846868
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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