Funding outcome

Breathing in the newborn period of full term and premature babies is often irregular during sleep, in particular during REM sleep. Breathing is usually interrupted by pauses (apneas) often associated with drops in oxygenation and potential life-threatening events. The ability to maintain regular breathing and/or recover from these respiratory disturbances is fundamental for survival. Therapies to treat these conditions exist but often patients do not respond to treatments and no other pharmacological agents are available. Ongoing work from our laboratory has demonstrated that recruitment of expiratory activity during sleep improve ventilation both in the perinatal period and in the adult life of rodents. Furthermore, our work has demonstrated that a neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, which is realeased during period of REM sleep, is able to activate the region of the brain that controls expiratory activity therefore promoting ventilation during periods of irregular breathing. The objective of Nils' summer project is to further investigate nuclei in the brain that release this neurotransmitter in order to control recruitment of expiratory activity and therefore ameliorate breathing during sleep. Nils will use state of the art technologies and transgenic models to test the hypothesis that cholinergic modulation influences recruitment of expiratory activity and ventilation in an animal model of sleep.