Symposium: Stablishing zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model to study the effects of sleep deprivation on food intake behavior.

ANA PAULA GARCÍA

Congreso; SAN2022 MEETING; 2022

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Sleep deprivation has shown to affect the lives of millions of people every day and has a profound impact on the biology of the brain. Notably, it has been reported that in mammals, poor or short sleep produce overfeeding, promotes higher calorie intake from fat and carbohydrate sources, which increases the risk to overweight and obesity development. However, the effects of sleep disturbances in the brain centers that control the food intake behavior are largely unexplored. Zebrafish has been shown to be a suitable model for sleep and food intake research as the brain regulation of these behaviors are highly conserved in vertebrates. According to these, our aim is to stablish the zebrafish as a model to study the effects of sleep deprivation on food intake behavior and in the neural circuits involved in both behaviors, sleep and food intake. In order to reduce the time of sleep, adult zebrafish were submitted to repeated vibrations during the night. The levels of activity of the individuals were monitored during 24 hours in order to evidence the reduction of sleep duration. We observed that the male individuals exposed to the vibrations increased food intake as it was evidenced that the number of pellets ingested per day was significantly increased. The effects on the expression levels of neurotransmitters/ neuropeptides participating in control of food intake behavior and/or sleep will be analyzed, as well as the neural activation of its producing neurons.