The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
231–240 of 325 posts
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you need oxygen, then you need sleep! Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live without any sleep?
Plants breathe out oxygen, like we breathe out the other one.
Plants have chloroplasts that produce oxygen and sugar. But plants also have mitochondria that consume oxygen and sugar and run many of the same metabolic functions as in animals.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#233Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#234So, what products would work as "sleep in a pill", at least on the "not being exhausted" part (I suppose the "not getting crazy because of lack of REM sleep" would be different) ?
If you want to pull an all-nighter then caffeine pills will keep you awake and alert, but no substitute for sleep. I'm sure if you did this for multiple days in a row, you'd be just as messed up as if you forced yourself to stay awake without the pills.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#235So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. The paper shows that cell‑autonomous mild uncoupling in Drosophila sleep‑inducing neurons -- via Ucp4A/Ucp4C -- keeps the flies awake by lowering mitochondrial Δp and therefore electron leak. This suggests a biochemical rationale for sleep -- which is postponed by the uncoupler. That form of pharmacological manipulation is also a very local in…
I understand some of these words. Explain like I am 15?
Your brain is like a server and the way mitochondria make energy is like a slow memory leak. Sleep is like running garbage collection.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question isn't the timing but why it happens at all. Even at night, being unaware of one's surroundings during sleep is a huge disadvantage that requires lots of effort and adaptation to work around. It needs to produce commensurate benefits, but we're not sure what they are.
Exactly! Going offline for hours every day in an adversarial world is positively nuts ! The reason can't be idiosyncratic. No gentle gradient of comparative advantage can rationalize it. It must be something severe and nigh impossible to do any other way. Furthermore, sleep is very specifically about the taking the brain offline: that's what deteriorates first in the absence of sleep and the tortured workarounds for…
I mean, it still can be idiosyncratic if the local maximum is steep enough. Identifying and signalling subgroups of mitochondria in a cell to put on pause might be prohibitive, for instance, and would still reduce the power available to that cell.
Or maybe going all the way on and mostly-off with your mitochondria, even specifically with your brain mitochondria, really is that much more efficient than having half of them offline (but still consuming energy for upkeep) at any time. The brain is a big ol energy hog, after all.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#237So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. The paper shows that cell‑autonomous mild uncoupling in Drosophila sleep‑inducing neurons -- via Ucp4A/Ucp4C -- keeps the flies awake by lowering mitochondrial Δp and therefore electron leak. This suggests a biochemical rationale for sleep -- which is postponed by the uncoupler. That form of pharmacological manipulation is also a very local in…
> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. There are layers to this, some of which are definitely not ancient mysteries. We sleep because the environment has a day-night cycle. If any task an organism must perform is better done during the day, then evolution has a very clear gradient towards only doing that thing during the day. That leads to doing other things at night, since it wo…
If the brain fundamentally needs sleep then we'd sleep regardless, just not aligned to the day-night cycle. There's quite a bit of variation in sleep patterns and amounts between different animals. Chinstrap Penguins only sleep a few seconds at a time, but still manage to rack up ~11hr sleep in a 24hr period! Elephants only sleep for ~2hr/day, horses for 3hr/day.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question isn't the timing but why it happens at all. Even at night, being unaware of one's surroundings during sleep is a huge disadvantage that requires lots of effort and adaptation to work around. It needs to produce commensurate benefits, but we're not sure what they are.
Exactly! Going offline for hours every day in an adversarial world is positively nuts ! The reason can't be idiosyncratic. No gentle gradient of comparative advantage can rationalize it. It must be something severe and nigh impossible to do any other way. Furthermore, sleep is very specifically about the taking the brain offline: that's what deteriorates first in the absence of sleep and the tortured workarounds for…
> Mitochondria are too universal and sleep is too specific to the brain
The brain has uniquely high specific power requirements per gram of dry weight. Not even the heart is this power-hungry. This surely places a lot of uniquely high metabolic stress on the neural cells.
And neural cells are long-living, so they can't be easily replaced throughout the lifetime. So their housekeeping has to be very thorough, carefully cleaning up all the waste products.
So this hypothesis actually makes a lot of sense.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#239To me this paper confuses regulation via mitochondria from the requirement of sleep. Even if experimentally manipulating mitochondria state induces sleep, this might just be a proxy indicator control mechanism. ETC leak is only an issue for these dFBNs which are specifically complementary active to normal neuronal cells. I would say mitochondria are important for sleep regulation but this is specific to animals with brains. Other kingdoms do not "sleep". This is too much a stretch to say mitochondria dysfunction is the cause of sleep when other kingdoms also have mitochondrial stress and don't have actual analogical "sleep" processes. My raw take given my PhD work was on mitochondria.
Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure anybody is disagreeing with this. Yes, evolution, day night cycles. The point of this is finding the 'mechanism' which evolution came up, and now we can manipulate it to fit the modern world and stay up at night.
It's interesting that sleep is controlled by mitochondria, but sleep is clearly involved in learning, and whatever algorithm for intelligence the brain does. Do those algorithms still work if you intervene at the level of the mitochondria? Or are the mitochondria just a good way of measuring elapsed time through energy expenditure? e.g. The algorithm needs a sleep phase to run roughly every x neural firings, or perfo…
There are also other reasons for sleep, like cleaning up neurotransmitters and stocking them up in advance. I would guess it's a more immediate trigger?