Rihel lab paper in eLife links Alzheimer’s disease molecules to sleep

Congratulations to Guliz Ozcan and colleagues for a new paper in Elife. Guliz discovered that amyloid beta, the molecule that builds up in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease affects sleep in zebrafish. Intriguingly, she found that the structure of Amyloid beta matters, with short forms of the molecule driving wakefulness and long forms driving sleep. Since Alzheimer’s patients have sleep problems, often years before cognitive decline, they speculate that early changes to the composition of amyloid beta types in the brain may be altering sleep.    

There is also a Twitter summary of the paper

Please go to the website to learn more about the work of the Rihel lab