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For most animals, the need for sleep gradually increases during waking hours and then decreases while sleeping. In neuroscience, this accumulating need to sleep is known as sleep pressure.

Understanding how the brain represents the need for sleep could be clinically relevant. For instance, it could help to identify processes that are disrupted in individuals with sleep disorders, such as insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea.

Researchers at the University of Oxford's Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior studied fruit flies to explore the possible contribution of rhythmic changes in neural activity to the regulation of sleep. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, identifies a neural circuit in the fly brain that generates slow electrical oscillations which appear to encode sleep pressure and promote sleep.

"Sleep is one of the great biological mysteries—perhaps the only universal behavior whose function remains unknown," Gero Miesenböck, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

"For the past 15 years or so, we have been trying to solve this mystery by studying the function of sleep-promoting neurons in the brain. These neurons must somehow 'know' what the molecular substrate of tiredness is and convert it into sleep-inducing electrical activity."

In one of their earlier papers , Miesenböck and his colleagues reported that, in fruit flies, sleep pressure originated in mitochondrial respiration. , mitochondria) use oxygen to release energy.

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