Dormivigilia

This week, our lab published a paper that we’ve been working on for some time (and one that I’m continuing). It’s also kind of hilarious that Montegraphia made it onto a paper from my postdoctoral lab (see acknowledgments section) before me! He only beat me by a few weeks though…. Our lab is interested in [...]

Before the widespread use of transgenic mice, reproductive physiologists had limited means of studying the effects of sex (or gender) on behavioral and physiological processes; most studies would remove an animal’s gonads, causing the (sex) hormonal environment to be somewhat ‘equal,’ and then would restore the circulation or do a swap replacement (androgens to females, [...]

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a study that examined genetic (Bmal1) and tissue (fat cell) regulation of body weight, insulin sensitivity, and related signaling in mice fed a high fat diet. This study had a similar specific aim except that Bmal1 expression in specific tissues was not a concern. This study used mice [...]

It’s no surprise that the New Year and society’s obsession with food and dieting has prompted interest in studies investigating sleep and circadian regulation of food intake and vice versa. I’ve highlighted a few in my most recent posts. Today, I read an early press release from a sleep researcher who I met at my [...]

In our sleep and circadian rhythms journal club today, we discussed a Nature paper that utilized many in vivo and in vitro methods to elucidate genetic (Bmal1) and tissue-specific (fat cell) regulation of eating, energy expenditure, and the underlying physiology. In order to do so, they knocked out Bmal1 expression in fat cells (adipocytes) using [...]

Today, we had our annual research symposium. Our keynote speaker hailed from Duke. He spent the early part of his science career studying the ethology and phylogeny of vocalization, particularly in birds and humans. But, today I learned that mice have very complex vocalizations for the purpose of mating and establishing social hierarchies. A recent [...]

Over the years, I meet many cool, brilliant researchers at the annual sleep meeting. Bryce Mander, a postdoc in the laboratory of Matt Walker at UC-Berkeley is one of them. He has undertaken many studies throughout his research career that have examined the effects of aging on sleep. In this study, Bryce and his collaborators [...]

There’s been an abundance of studies focusing on adenosinergic regulation of sleep. I highlighted one less than two weeks ago, but you can find many others through the search engine of my blog. In this particular study, British researchers used adenosine biosensors and an in vitro model of study unlike most preceding experiments which relied [...]

Every so often, I read about new (and old) strategies for improving athletic performance and accelerating recovery in the Crossfit Journal. Recently, I came across a review on the benefits of sleep and the consequences of restricted sleep as published by a CEO of a sleep-related business venture. He’s not a sleep expert per se, but he [...]

I just finished reading this article that predicted adaptation to (night) shift using computational biology. I thought that this figure presented in the paper nicely captures the consequences of night shift work (shaded green) following some time off (shaded red) and a “day” of sleep (shaded blue). The second, third, and fourth rows are of [...]