Restoring access to long-term social recognition memories disrupted by sleep deprivation
Abstract
Long-term social memories are vital for forming and maintaining relationships, and social amnesia can disrupt daily life. Using a new paradigm to study these hippocampus-dependent memories, we show that mice can distinguish between multiple social experiences even when they occur in the same context across days. Sleep deprivation immediately after socialization disrupts memory consolidation, leading to social amnesia. Treatment with the Food and Drug Administration-approved phosphodiesterase type 4 inhibitor roflumilast during sleep deprivation protects memory consolidation, while administration immediately before testing reverses social amnesia temporarily. Optogenetic reactivation of dentate gyrus engram cells restores social memory access and enables selective retrieval of individual memories. In addition, using two cFos-based engram-tagging strategies, we find that sleep deprivation selectively affects reactivation of experience-specific engrams while not affecting engram formation or overlap. These results suggest that impaired engram reactivation contributes to sleep deprivation-induced social amnesia and highlights the role of the hippocampal dentate gyrus in maintaining and distinguishing social experiences in a single context.
Read the paper
Related studies
- Multifocal clonal evolution characterized using circulating tumour DNA in a case of metastatic breast cancer
- What are the causes of late-life depression?
- Identification of SOX3 as an XX male sex reversal gene in mice and humans
- Retrospective study of concussive convulsions in elite Australian rules and rugby league footballers: phenomenology, aetiology, and outcome
- Uveal melanomas presenting during pregnancy and the investigation of oestrogen receptors in melanomas
- Metabolic and pathologic profiles of human LSS deficiency recapitulated in mice
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.