Isoflurane anesthesia CNS recovery state: ultra-slow oscillations and cellular-stress-responsive gene expression
General anesthesia and NREM sleep share slow-wave EEG features, yet whether anesthesia substitutes for physiological sleep remains unclear. We compared recovery from 4h of isoflurane anesthesia (IA) with time-matched sleep and sleep deprivation (SD) in male C57BL/6J mice using continuous EEG/EMG recordings and frontal cortex RNA sequencing. IA recovery produced transient, rebound arousal, reduced early NREM and REM sleep, and, fragmented subsequent NREM bouts, and persistant, ultra-slow EEG-oscillations that normalized within two weeks. Whereas, SD induced consolidated rebound sleep and slow wave activity. Transcriptomic profiling at ZT6 showed that IA and SD induced largely distinct cortical gene-expression programs. IA preferentially enriched integrated stress response and unfolded protein response genes, whereas SD showed a comparatively orthogonal, growth-permissive, mTOR-associated profile. Although IA-induced gene-expression suggests cellular stress, corticosterone measurements argued against systemic stress as the primary driver. These findings indicate that isoflurane recovery is neurophysiologically and molecularly distinct from restorative sleep.