Luisa de Vivo

University of Camerino | UNICAM · Scuola di Scienze del Farmaco e dei Prodotti della Salute

Background: Insufficient sleep is a serious public health problem in modern society. It leads to increased risk of chronic diseases, and it has been frequently associated with cellular oxida-tive damage and widespread low-grade inflammation. Probiotics have been attracting increasing interest recently for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory pro...

Background Prolonged cellular activity may overload cell function, leading to high rates of protein synthesis and accumulation of misfolded or unassembled proteins, which cause endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and activate the unfolded protein response (UPR) to re-establish normal protein homeostasis. Previous molecular work has demonstrated that...

Multiple evidence in rodents shows that the strength of excitatory synapses in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus is greater after wake than after sleep. The widespread synaptic weakening afforded by sleep is believed to keep the cost of synaptic activity under control, promote memory consolidation, and prevent synaptic saturation, thus preserving...

Multiple evidence in rodents shows that the strength of excitatory synapses in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus is greater after wake than after sleep. The widespread synaptic weakening afforded by sleep is believed to keep the cost of synaptic activity under control, promote memory consolidation, and prevent synaptic saturation, thus preserving...

Modern life poses many threats to good-quality sleep, challenging brain health across the lifespan. Curtailed or fragmented sleep may be particularly damaging during adolescence, when sleep disruption by delayed chronotypes and societal pressures coincides with our brains preparing for adult life via intense refinement of neural connectivity. These...

There is molecular, electrophysiological, and ultrastructural evidence that a net increase in synaptic strength occurs in many brain circuits during spontaneous wake (SW) or short sleep deprivation, reflecting ongoing learning. Sleep leads instead to a broad but selective weakening of many forebrain synapses, thus preventing synaptic saturation and...

Perisynaptic astrocytic processes (PAPs) carry out several different functions, from metabolite clearing to control of neuronal excitability and synaptic plasticity. All these functions are likely orchestrated by complex cellular machinery that resides within the PAPs and relies on a fine interplay between multiple subcellular components. However,...

Sleep dependent synaptic plasticity is crucial for optimal cognition. However, establishing the direction of synaptic plasticity during sleep has been particularly challenging since data in support of both synaptic potentiation and depotentiation have been reported. This review focuses on structural synaptic plasticity across sleep and wake and sum...

In adolescent and adult brains several molecular, electrophysiological and ultrastructural measures of synaptic strength are higher after wake than after sleep1,2. These results support the proposal that a core function of sleep is to renormalize the increase in synaptic strength associated with ongoing learning during wake, to reestablish cellular...

Sleep has been hypothesized to rebalance overall synaptic strength after ongoing learning during waking leads to net synaptic potentiation. If so, since synaptic strength and size are correlated, synapses on average should be larger after wake and smaller after sleep. This prediction was recently confirmed in mouse cerebral cortex using serial bloc...

Myelin plasticity is gaining increasing recognition as an essential partner to synaptic plasticity, which mediates experience-dependent brain structure and function. However , how neural activity induces adaptive myelination and which mechanisms are involved remain open questions. More than two decades of transcriptomic studies in rodents have reve...

Astrocytic glycogen represents the only form of glucose storage in the brain, and one of the outcomes of its breakdown is the production of lactate that can be used by neurons as an alternative energetic substrate. Since brain metabolism is higher in wake than in sleep, it was hypothesized that glycogen stores are depleted during wake and replenish...

Study Objectives Previous studies found that sleep loss can suppress the expression of genes implicated in myelination and can have adverse effects on oligodendrocyte precursors cells. On the other hand, sleep may favor myelination by promoting the expression of genes involved in its formation and maintenance. Albeit limited, these results suggest...

INTRODUCTION: Sleep-dependent consolidation of motor learning has been extensively studied in humans, but it remains unclear why some, but not all, learned skills benefit from sleep. AIMS AND METHODS: Here, we compared 2 different motor tasks, both requiring the mice to run on an accelerating device. In the rotarod task, mice learn to maintain bala...

The activity-regulated cytoskeleton associated protein Arc is strongly and quickly upregulated by neuronal activity, synaptic potentiation and learning. Arc entry in the synapse is followed by the endocytosis of glutamatergic AMPA receptors (AMPARs), and its nuclear accumulation has been shown in vitro to result in a small decline in the transcript...

We previously found that Mertk and its ligand Gas6, astrocytic genes involved in phagocytosis, are upregulated after acute sleep deprivation. These results suggested that astrocytes may engage in phagocytic activity during extended wake, but direct evidence was lacking. Studies in humans and rodents also found that sleep loss increases peripheral m...

Synapse remodeling during sleep General activity and information processing while an animal is awake drive synapse strengthening. This is counterbalanced by weakening of synapses during sleep (see the Perspective by Acsády). De Vivo et al. used serial scanning electron microscopy to reconstruct axon-spine interface and spine head volume in the mous...

Study objectives: Sleep-dependent consolidation of motor learning has been extensively studied in humans, but it remains unclear why some, but not all learned skills benefit from sleep. Methods: Here we compared 2 different motor tasks, both requiring the mice to run on an accelerating device. In the rotarod task mice learn to maintain balance w...

Cortical circuits mature in stages, from early synaptogenesis and synaptic pruning to late synaptic refinement, resulting in the adult anatomical connection matrix. Because the mature matrix is largely fixed, genetic or environmental factors interfering with its establishment can have irreversible effects. Sleep disruption is rarely considered amon...

Study Objective: The adolescent brain may be uniquely affected by acute sleep deprivation (SD) and chronic sleep restriction (CSR), but direct evidence is lacking. We used electron microscopy to examine how SD and CSR affect pyramidal neurons in frontal cortex of adolescent mice, focusing on mitochondria, endosomes, and lysosomes that together perf...

Transcriptomic studies revealed that hundreds of mRNAs show differential expression in the brains of sleeping relative to awake rats, mice, flies, and sparrows. Although these results have offered clues regarding the molecular consequences of sleep and sleep loss, their functional significance thus far has been limited. This is probably because the...

Astrocytes can mediate neurovascular coupling, modulate neuronal excitability, and promote synaptic maturation and remodeling. All these functions are likely to be modulated by the sleep/wake cycle, because brain metabolism, neuronal activity and synaptic turnover change as a function of behavioral state. Yet, little is known about the effects of s...

In humans sleep slow wave activity (SWA) declines during adolescence. It has been suggested that this decline reflects the elimination of cortical synapses, but this hypothesis has never been tested directly. We focused on mouse frontal cortex and collected data from early adolescence (∼postnatal day 20, P20) to adulthood (P60) of (1) SWA; (2) expr...

Brain cells are immersed in a complex structure forming the extracellular matrix. The composition of the matrix gradually matures during postnatal development, as the brain circuitry reaches its adult form. The fully developed extracellular environment stabilizes neuronal connectivity and decreases cortical plasticity as highlighted by the demonstr...

Brain cells are immersed in a complex structure forming the extracellular matrix. The composition of the matrix gradually matures during postnatal development, as the brain circuitry reaches its adult form. The fully developed extracellular environment stabilizes neuronal connectivity and decreases cortical plasticity as highlighted by the demonstr...

EAAT4-eGFP BAC reporter transgenic adult mice were used to detect EAAT4 gene expression in individual cells of cerebral cortex, and eGFP fluorescence was measured to compare EAAT4 promoter activity in different cells. Most eGFP+ cells were neurons; only rare GFAP+ profiles were eGFP+. About 10% of NeuN+ cells was eGFP+, and the percentage of NeuN/e...

GLT-1 eGFP BAC reporter transgenic adult mice were used to detect GLT-1 gene expression in individual cells of CA1, CA3 and SI, and eGFP fluorescence was measured to analyze quantitatively GLT-1 promoter activity in different cells of neocortex and hippocampus. Virtually all GFAP+ astrocytes were eGFP+; we also found that about 80% of neurons in CA...

In the present study a Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) strain Lactobacillus delbrueckii delbrueckii, acting as probiotic, was administered to Dicentrarchus labrax (European sea bass) juveniles for a short (25 days) and a long (59 days) time and the effects of the bacteria on gut colonization in sea bass juveniles cortisol level and growth were evaluated...