Research Symposium

BIO

I am a second year biochemistry major from Chandler, Arizona. Outside of UROP, I am also the Director of Academics for my sorority Alpha Phi. In the future, I hope to enter a career in biotechnology or pharmaceuticals.

Determining Behavioral Sex Differences to Chronic Sleep Deprivation in Mice

Abstract

Over one-third of Americans suffer from chronic sleep deprivation in today’s society because of high work demands and added daily stress. Chronic sleep loss can lead to many health and neurodegenerative issues such as anxiety, depression, memory loss, and even Alzheimer's. This project studies the difference between male and female behavioral responses to a later bedtime using physical cues. To conduct this experiment, male and female mice were sleep deprived 5 hours a day, for 5 days to mimic a strenuous work week with hours extending past typical sleep onset. A protocol of manually tapping and shaking the cages when the mice first started to fall asleep was used and tallies of each tap and shake were recorded. This data was then plotted and analyzed in GraphPad Prism. The results show that the female mice required significantly fewer taps and shakes on average compared to the males, suggesting they were more active. Future experiments could study the implications of possible neuroprotective factors through RNA sequencing and gene expression analysis. Analyzing the over or under expression of certain genes, as well as hormonal fluctuations in females during sleep deprivation could provide insight on a possible neuroprotective effect.

Keywords: neuroscience, sleep, behavioral