Chris Vecsey, January 24
Please join the department of Biology in welcoming Dr. Chris Vecsey, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Skidmore College, for his talk entitled, “Don’t Sleep on the Fly! Neuropeptide Regulation of Sleep.” The talk will be held via Zoom on January 24, 2022 at 4pm EST. For access to the Zoom information, please contact Becca Rohn at (304)293-5201 or at becca.rohn@mail.wvu.edu.More on the talk:
We spend nearly one third of our lives asleep, but the mechanisms
that regulate sleep are still poorly understood. Peptide
neurotransmitters appear to control sleep in multiple species,
although exactly how they do this is still unclear. Dr. Vecsey’s lab
studies the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in order to examine
how activation of neurons that release these neuropeptides
influence sleep. In this talk, he will focus on the effects of activating
neurons producing short neuropeptide F (sNPF), showing that even
brief optogenetic neuronal activation produces long-term increases
in sleep. These studies pave the way for a more mechanistic
understanding of the brain signals that influence our daily sleep
patterns.