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Several studies suggest that sleep helps in the consolidation of certain memories but its role in the consolidation of trace and delay conditioned memories is not clearly known.Using the trace and delay conditioning paradigms in rats, we have found that consolidation of these memories is sleep-dependent as sleep deprivation impairs the consolidation of these memories.Further, it is believed that various sleep stages, possibly in part, provide an optimal condition to the brain for a range of distinct memory consolidation processes.For example, proficient learning of visual texture discrimination task augments total sleep, while the motor sequence task and motor adaptation task increase NREM sleep only.It is not known, however, if the change in sleep architecture after learning is a memory consolidation dependent phenomenon.Our data suggest that the altered sleep architecture after learning is indeed a memory consolidation dependent mechanism.The alteration in sleep architecture during the encoding of memory seems to be an essential procedural demand to fulfill the memory consolidation phenomenon.Additionally, we have reported that sleep potentiates in-vivo cortical synaptic plasticity by augmenting the neuronal firing rates, suggesting that it plays an instructive role for synaptic plasticity, which could be an underlying mechanism of memory consolidation.Acknowledgments: Funding to SKJ from CSIR, DBT, DST, UGC-Resource Networking grant, DST-PURSE, Capacity Build-up grant, Universitys seed money is highly acknowledged.