Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny

Abstract The behavioral effects of anesthetics are highly conserved across species, hinting at shared and fundamental underlying mechanisms. Here we compile a dataset of multiscale neural activity during wakefulness and anesthesia, encompassing human, macaque, marmoset, mouse, zebrafish and nematode. Applying massive feature extraction, we characterize local neural dynamics across >6,000 time-series features. This reveals a conserved dynamical profile of anesthesia across species, characterized by shorter intrinsic timescales of neural activity and dampened inter-regional synchrony. Deep-brain stimulation of the macaque centromedian thalamus reverses this profile and restores behavioral responsiveness. This conserved dynamical phenotype covaries with conserved transcriptional profiles of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission. Biophysical modeling provides a potential mechanistic link between the macroscale dynamical phenotype of anesthesia and microscale effects of key molecular targets on the timescales of synaptic excitation and inhibition. These analyses reveal a shared neural endpoint of anesthesia: across species and scales, anesthetics induce spatiotemporal isolation of local neural activity.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nature Neuroscience
Published
2026-09-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02460-4
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Neural dynamics and brain function
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
5.63
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article

Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny

Lynn Uhrig, Emmanuel Andreas Stamatakis, Daniel Golkowski, Paul De Koninck et al.
1 citations
Nature Neuroscience
Neural dynamics and brain function
5.63
article

Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny

Lynn Uhrig, Emmanuel Andreas Stamatakis, Daniel Golkowski, Paul De Koninck, Alain Destexhe, Jordy Tasserie, Rüdiger Ilg, Hideyuki Okano, Rodrigo Cofré, Golia Shafiei, Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Antoine Légaré, Patrick Desrosiers, Bratislav Mišić, David Krishna Menon, Silvia Gini, Andrea I. Luppi, Junichi Hata, Alessandro Gozzi, Béchir Jarraya, Zhen-Qi Liu, Andreas Ranft, Kanako Muta, Yohan Yee, Ben Fulcher, Pablo Castro, Christopher W. Connor, Denis Jordan
article en
1 citations

Abstract

Abstract The behavioral effects of anesthetics are highly conserved across species, hinting at shared and fundamental underlying mechanisms. Here we compile a dataset of multiscale neural activity during wakefulness and anesthesia, encompassing human, macaque, marmoset, mouse, zebrafish and nematode. Applying massive feature extraction, we characterize local neural dynamics across >6,000 time-series features. This reveals a conserved dynamical profile of anesthesia across species, characterized by shorter intrinsic timescales of neural activity and dampened inter-regional synchrony. Deep-brain stimulation of the macaque centromedian thalamus reverses this profile and restores behavioral responsiveness. This conserved dynamical phenotype covaries with conserved transcriptional profiles of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission. Biophysical modeling provides a potential mechanistic link between the macroscale dynamical phenotype of anesthesia and microscale effects of key molecular targets on the timescales of synaptic excitation and inhibition. These analyses reveal a shared neural endpoint of anesthesia: across species and scales, anesthetics induce spatiotemporal isolation of local neural activity.

Nature Neuroscience
Boston University (US), University of Copenhagen (DK), Brigham and Women's Hospital (US), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR), The University of Sydney (AU), Harvard University (US), Inserm (FR), University of Calgary (CA), University of Trento (IT), Keio University (JP), Université Paris Cité (FR), University of Cambridge (GB), Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (FR), Université Paris-Saclay (FR), RIKEN Center for Brain Science (JP), University Hospital Heidelberg (DE), TUM Klinikum (DE), FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (CH), Italian Institute of Technology (IT), University of Oxford (GB), Institut des Neurosciences Paris-Saclay (FR), Sorbonne Paris Cité (FR), Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems (IT), CEA Paris-Saclay (FR), Institut de Physique de Nice (FR), Hôpital Foch (FR), Asklepios (DE), Université Laval (CA), McGill University (CA), Technical University of Munich (DE), Tokyo Metropolitan University (JP), University of Pennsylvania (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Neural dynamics and brain function
5.63
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