A new study by scientists at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, has unearthed a key factor that may lie at the center of sleep’s indispensability: its restorative effect on individual brain cells.

The team, which Prof. Lior Appelbaum led, reports its new findings in a study paper that appears in the journal Nature Communications.In this study, the investigators turned to zebrafish, which scientists often use in research because they are surprisingly similar to humans.

Approximately 70 percent of human genes also occur in this freshwater species. Using 3D time-lapse imaging, the scientists looked at the effects of sleep on a microscale and observed how it affected single neurons, or brain cells.

The high-resolution technology allowed Prof. Applebaum and team to follow the movement of DNA and proteins within brain cells. They found that during sleep, individual neurons were...

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