Grabau Helps Kroeger Lab Unravel Effects of Sleep

Sleep remains a mystery, and understanding its precise impact on various physiological functions is still elusive. However, Auburn University researcher Natasha Grabau is using the sleep-health connection in mice to decode the mystery, using them as a model to explore how sleep shapes human health and well-being.
In fact, Grabau, a doctoral candidate in the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology, came to Auburn from Sri Lanka specifically to join the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Dr. Daniel Kroeger, who specializes in studying the neural circuitries of sleep. The research on mice the lab conducts helps further the understanding of the effects of sleep in people, yet another example of the One Health concept linking animal and human health.
“Our lab concentrates on sleep and physiology,” said Grabau, who was runner-up in Auburn’s 2023 Three-Minute Thesis competition and won second place in STEM for her poster at the university’s 2024 Research Symposium. “We study different regions of the brain to determine which areas or neurons are best targeted by different techniques such as chemogenetics or optogenetics to increase natural sleep. We then assess how increased sleep affects physiological processes such as immune responses or neurodegeneration, as well as cognition and behavior.”

Currently, Grabau is involved with multiple projects with the Kroeger team, including a study of the role of sleep in auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis. “Recent discoveries suggest sleep is essential for the maintenance and optimal functioning of the immune system,” Grabau explained. “We sought to determine how increased sleep or decreased sleep affects the body’s response to infections.”
She is also part of another study on sleep and Alzheimer’s disease. “Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease leading to debilitating cognitive decline,” Grabau said. “Currently, there is no cure and few disease-modifying treatments. One of the most commonly reported symptoms in Alzheimer’s is poor sleep, often preceding cognitive dysfunction by several years.
“Importantly, research in mice has shown poor sleep worsens Alzheimer’s, while Alzheimer’s in turn worsens sleep,” she continued. “That’s why we set out to improve sleep in our Alzheimer’s mice to then assess the progression of the disease.”
The Kroeger lab’s Alzheimer’s research, still in its early stages, will test whether increasing the amount of daily sleep during the early stages of the disease can break the cycle and modify or halt disease progression, preventing cognitive decline.
And for Grabau, working on such research has been the fulfillment of a lifetime dream — one she wants to continue in her future career. “I always wanted to work in neuroscience, which my undergraduate supervisor in Sri Lanka knew but couldn’t accommodate due to a lack of resources,” she said. “But when I reached out to Dr. Kroeger and he explained how we would be looking into the neural circuitries of sleep and working on Alzheimer’s too, I was sold!”