RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Recovery of consolidation after sleep following experimental stroke – interaction of slow waves, spindles and GABA JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2021.01.21.427707 DO 10.1101/2021.01.21.427707 A1 Jaekyung Kim A1 Ling Guo A1 April Hishinuma A1 Stefan Lemke A1 Dhakshin S. Ramanathan A1 Seok-Joon Won A1 Karunesh Ganguly YR 2021 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/24/2021.01.21.427707.abstract AB Sleep is known to be important for promoting recovery after brain injuries such as stroke. Yet, it remains unclear how such injuries affect neural processing during sleep and how to precisely enhance sleep-dependent memory processing during recovery. Using an experimental model of focal cortical stroke in rats along with long-term electrophysiological monitoring of neural firing and sleep microarchitecture, here we show that sleep-dependent neural processing is altered after stroke induction. Specifically, we found that the precise coupling of spindles to global slow- oscillations (SO), a phenomenon that is known to be important for memory consolidation, appeared to be disrupted by a pathological increase in “isolated” local delta waves. The transition from this pathological to a more physiological sleep state – with both a reduction in isolated delta waves and increased spindle coupling to SO – was associated with sustained performance gains after task training during recovery. Interestingly, post-injury sleep processing could be pushed towards a more physiological state via a pharmacological reduction of tonic GABA. Together, our results suggest that sleep processing after cortical brain injuries may be impaired due to an increase in local delta waves and that restoration of physiological processing is important for recovery of task performance.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.