Fig. 4.

A global brain state transition governs C. elegans microfluidic-induced sleep. a Adult animal immobilized in a microfluidic chamber tailored for whole-brain imaging. (Inset) Single-plane epifluorescence image of an animal with pan-neuronal expression of GCaMP6s. b Representative animal shows behavioral quiescence correlates with less neural activity. (Top) Behavioral activity trace quantified by tracking the motion of ten individual neurons (see “Methods” section). (Middle) Average fluorescence across the whole worm head ganglia. (Bottom) Activity of ten individual neurons show a clear brain-state transition and less neural activity during microfluidic-induced sleep. Arrow indicates the circled neuron in a, which increases in activity during sleep. c Using only behavioral activity, we identified quiescent bouts then quantified neural activity during sleep and wake. During microfluidic-induced sleep, animals exhibited a large-scale downregulation of neural activity across both the entire ganglia and most individual neurons. The neurons chosen for analysis were randomly selected from the field-of-view and are not necessarily the same neurons across every animal. (n = 7 animals; ten neurons were tracked per animal; ***p < 0.001, *****p < 0.00001, paired t-test). Source data is available as a Source Data file