Presynaptic and postsynaptic long-term plasticity in sleep homeostasis.

Sleep is an ancient and fundamental animal behavior. Sleep deprivation builds up sleep need to trigger recovery sleep, a homeostatic control crucial to maintain cognitive performance. Between several suggestions to explain the indispensable nature of sleep, restoration of synapse plasticity is a prominent one, though causal relations here remained scarce. In this review, we will discuss recent advances reporting a mutual functional interplay between sleep deprivation-associated synaptic changes and sleep homeostasis.