Mubarak Hussain Syed, an assistant professor of Biology at The University of New Mexico, along with a team of UNM students and collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania, is investigating how developmental and genetic factors affect sleep behavior. As in most of their projects, the Syed lab team uses Drosophila, commonly known as a fruit fly, for their research.
The groundbreaking research, titled Stem cell-specific ecdysone signaling regulates the development of dorsal fan-shaped body neurons and sleep homeostasis, was recently published in Current Biology, a journal that publishes high-impact basic research across all areas of biology.
The Syed team studies how developmental and genetic factors regulate the formation of thousands of different neuron types and their behavioral output, in this case, to focus on sleep behavior. Syed recently received the 2024 McKnight Scholar Award, which is granted to young scientists who are in the early stages of establishing their own independent laboratories and research careers and who have demonstrated a commitment to neuroscience.
Team members on the sleep research project include Adil Wani, a UNM graduate student in the lab, who led the research.
"Adil has done fantastic work and performed most of the experiments with the help of undergraduates Gonzalo Morales Chaya and Krishna Patel," Syed said, also adding his thanks to collaborators Dr. Budhaditya Chowdhury from The City University of New York, and Drs. Jenny Luoung and Matthew Kayser, both from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, sleep experts who performed the sleep behavior analysis.
"Drosophila, usually called a fruit fly, is an excellent genetic model system for understanding the development and function of neural circuits. With sophisticated genetic tools, scientists can label individual neural stem cells, track their development over time, and manipulate genes in a cell type specific manner," Syed explained.
Syed's Neural Diversity Lab focuses on understanding the basic biology of brain development with the aim of gaining information that might provide insights into understanding the development of the brain and the disorders associated with when things go awry during development.
"Our goal is to understand how different neuron types are generated during development and how these neuron types acquire their function," Syed said. "Sleep is necessary for survival, and many neurodevelopmental disorders accompany sleep deficits, making it an interesting circuit and behavior to study. While many studies have been done on the genetic and circuit basis of sleep regulation, how development shapes sleep circuits and behaviors is unknown. To our knowledge, this study is the first to link neural stem cells to sleep behavior."
"We have identified the neural stem cells that produce the sleep-regulating neurons of Drosophila. We show that late neural stem cells in the maggot brain, with the help of a steroid hormone, ecdysone, regulate the formation of these sleep neurons. Our studies further show that adult sleep is fragmented upon disrupting hormonal signaling during development," Syed said, adding, "Interestingly, in many neurodevelopmental disorders, sleep is fragmented, so perhaps our study will help understand the basis of these defects… Understanding how the brain is built and assembled during development is essential for understanding how the brain functions and the lessons gained will help provide strategies for treating neurodevelopmental disorders."
The National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, Sloan Foundation, and McKnight Foundation generously supported this research.
Top image: Brain of a fruit fly.
