Monday - the day for checking in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine for the newest published articles. And there is some good stuff:
Characterization of Sleep in Zebrafish and Insomnia in Hypocretin Receptor Mutants
Sleep disorders are common and poorly understood. Further, how and why the brain generates sleep is the object of intense speculations. In this study, we demonstrate that a bony fish used for genetic studies sleeps and that a molecule, hypocretin, involved in causing narcolepsy, is conserved. In humans, narcolepsy is a sleep disorder associated with sleepiness, abnormal dreaming, and paralysis and insomnia. We generated a mutant fish in which the hypocretin system was disrupted. Intriguingly, this fish sleep mutant does not display sleepiness or paralysis but has a 30% reduction of its sleep time at night and a 60% decrease in sleep bout length compared with non-mutant fish. We also studied the relationships between the hypocretin system and other sleep regulatory brain systems in zebrafish and found differences in expression patterns in the brain that may explain the differences in behavior. Our study illustrates how a sleep regulatory system may have evolved across vertebrate phylogeny. Zebrafish, a powerful genetic model that has the advantage of transparency to study neuronal networks in vivo, can be used to study sleep.
Also check the accompanying synopsis: Let Sleeping Zebrafish Lie: A New Model for Sleep Studies:
Although the function of sleep is hotly debated, one thing is clear--we, and most other animals, cannot do without it. In a new study, Yokogawa et al. describe how zebrafish sleep, finding both striking similarities to mammalian sleep and its regulation and intriguing differences.
Also, on the 4th birthday of PLoS Biology, a good editorial: When Is Open Access Not Open Access?
Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in "open-access" journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), hosted by Lund University Libraries, lists 2,816 open-access journals as this article goes to press (and probably more by the time you read this). Authors also have various "open-access" options within existing subscription journals offered by traditional publishers (e.g., Blackwell, Springer, Oxford University Press, and many others). In return for a fee to the publisher, an author's individual article is made freely available and (sometimes) deposited in PubMed Central (PMC). But, as open access grows in prominence, so too has confusion about what open access means, particularly with regard to unrestricted use of content--which true open access allows. This confusion is being promulgated by journal publishers at the expense of authors and funding agencies wanting to support open access.
And check these two important articles on observatinal studies in epidemiology:
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