Parvalbumin-expressing neurons in the ventral medulla are active during wakefulness and promote NREM sleep
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A longstanding hypothesis contends that sleep is promoted by sleep-active inhibitory neurons that suppress arousal centers. Sleep may also be facilitated by mechanisms active during wakefulness; however, evidence for wake-active sleep-promoting neurons is scarce. Here, we use chemogenetics, fiber photometry, and circuit mapping to identify subset(s) of inhibitory neurons that promote NREM sleep. We targeted the ventrolateral retropontine (VLRP) region of the medulla because of its proximity to REM and NREM sleep centers. We found that selective activation of parvalbumin (VLRPPvalb) neurons but not somatostatin or cholecystokinin-expressing VLRP neurons resulted in NREM-like sleep. Interestingly, VLRPPvalb neurons are most active during natural wakefulness and send inhibitory projections to the parabrachial nucleus, which presumably underlies their sleep-promoting function. These results identify VLRPPvalb neurons as a potential source of wake-active inhibitory input to wake-promoting centers in the dorsolateral pons that serve to constrain arousal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".