An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening

The locus coeruleus norepinephrine (LC-NE) system regulates arousal and awakening; however, it remains unclear whether the LC does this in a global or circuit-specific manner. We hypothesized that sensory-evoked awakenings are predominantly regulated by specific LC-NE efferent pathways. Anatomical, physiological, and functional modularities of LC-NE pathways involving the mouse basal forebrain (BF) and pontine reticular nucleus (PRN) were tested. We found partial anatomical segregation between the LC→PRN and LC→BF circuits. Extracellular NE dynamics in BF and PRN exhibited distinct sound-evoked activation during sleep, including a fast sound-evoked NE peak specific to PRN. Causal optogenetic interrogation of LC efferent pathways, by retro-ChR2 activation or PdCO silencing of synapses in target regions, revealed a role for early LC→PRN activity in driving arousal and sound-evoked awakenings. Together, our results uncover a role for early LC-NE PRN activity in connecting sensory and arous..., , , # An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.nzs7h453f](10.5061/dryad.nzs7h453f)

## Description of the data and file structure

Files are stored in matlab (.mat) format, and represents fiber photometry recordings during sound evoked awakening experiments.

The sound was a broad band noise lasting 1s, as described in Methods section. All the data are from NREM sleep, and trials are divided by outcome- either maintained sleep or awakening.

Each row represents a single trial, with information on the mouse ID, the trial outcome, the ROI if relevant, the time (from -2 to 3 s around sound onset), and the normalized delta f/f. Normalizaion included detrending and normalizing the full data stream to the isosbestic channel, and a subtraction of the 5 second baseline from each trial. For more details go to the methods section.
### Files and variables

#### File: doubleGRABne_table.mat

**Description:** WT mice (n=7) we...