ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1613747
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Emerging Neuroscience of SleepView all articles
Time-Dependent Cortical Responses to Siesta DeprivationDisruption in Male Mice
Provisionally accepted
- Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Siestas, or daytime naps, play a critical role in relieving sleep pressure and maintaining physiological balance. However, the effects of siesta deprivationdisruption remain largely unexplored. In this study, we disrupted the natural siesta period (ZT20-23) through daily bedding changes for two weeks and examined its effects on overall stress levels, sleep architecture, behavior, and transcriptional responses in the frontal cortex. Siesta deprivationdisruption during the late dark phase led to increased core body temperature, locomotor activity, and wakefulness, while having minimal effects on subsequent light phase sleep patterns, behavioral performance, or serum stress markers. Transcriptomic analysis at ZT0 and ZT12 revealed distinct time-dependent responses: ZT0 was associated with the activation of stressrelated and homeostatic pathways, whereas ZT12 showed enrichment of genes related to neuronal structure and intracellular transport. These findings suggest that even short-term siesta deprivationdisruption induces mild but phase-specific cortical adaptations, involving early stress mitigation at ZT0 followed by synaptic remodeling at ZT12.
Keywords: siesta deprivationdisruption, Circadian timing, stress response, frontal cortex, Transcriptomics
Received: 17 Apr 2025; Accepted: 17 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ding, Shibata, Kubo and Tahara. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yu Tahara, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.