Skip to main content

Post 6

By
I was really interested to read the papers on schizophrenia animal models because schizophrenia seems to be a much more complex, internal mental illness than some of the other ones we’ve seen and its symptoms sound like they would be harder to cause and also observe in animals, especially in rodents. Some of the big symptoms that come to mind when I think of schizophrenia are hallucinations, delusions, and changes in speaking. From the little that I know about rodent research, I would imagine that these would be hard to observe in mice or rats. The Burrows (2015) paper focused on three symptoms, prepulse inhibition, long term spatial learning, and spontaneous hyperactivity. These few symptoms put together do not seem like a comprehensive representation of schizophrenia. I think this combined with my lack of background knowledge on the role NMDA plays in schizophrenia made it hard for me to fully understand how the Burrows (2015) paper really related to schizophrenia. The use of the mGLU5 receptor built off the assumption that the NMDA receptor is involved in schizophrenia. Does the NMDA receptor research that this mGLU5 receptor built off of also only use a few, unrepresentative symptoms to model schizophrenia? I could see this snowballing into a problem where research builds off of research that doesn’t fully and accurately model the illness it is supposed to model. How can scientists and journals stop this kind of domino effect?

We’ve discussed several times in class about how research has been using only male mice in experiments and leaving out female mice and we finally have a paper that uses both male and female mice in their research. It’s especially interesting that this particular research uses both male and female mice because it deals with prenatal development versus postnatal development. Male and female brains develop differently during prenatal periods and as a result are also different during postnatal development so it’s interesting to see here that there are actually differences in male and female behavior and phenotypes which support the stance that females should not be left out of research and that males are not representative of the entire species.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gut-Brain Interactions: Buffington et al, Reber et al 2016

By
April 13 Papers (Buffington et. al, Reber et. al) I found this week’s papers to be quite novel in that they both proposed potential treatments for neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorders that target bacterial or microbial abnormalities and how these give rise to certain behavioral and physical symptoms associated with the disorders. I thought this was a very unusual yet interesting approach, and as I have not previously studied the gut-brain axis, these papers offered me a fresh perspective on researching psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. They were also unconventional in their focus of the physical symptoms that often accompany mental disorders, as this is not something that I have seen many other papers touch upon very much. Particularly, I was surprised by the Reber et al paper’s focus on the link between psychiatric disorders and inflammation in organs other than the brain, such as the colon, and the Buffington et al paper’s description of a relationship between ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gut-brain axis

By
This weeks papers Reber et al. 2016 and Buffington et al. 2016 present a super interesting look into the gut-brain axis. Regarding both of these papers, it was amazing to see how potent favorable or unfavorable gut microbiome compositions are in affecting neuronal signaling and overall behavior. Reber et al. shows how immunoregulatory immunization with specifically heat killed M.vaccae can serve as a protective factor against chronic subordinate stress induce colotis as well as behavioral symptoms due to chronic stress as such. Interestringly, this paper depleted regulatory T cell activity via the anti CD25 antibody in order to show that the antiinflammatory mechanism induced by m vaccae immunization is depented on the secondary regulatory mechanisms offered by Treg proliferation and signaling. But, when T reg signaling was removed, this did not seem to cause a significant change in behavior . Therefore, this begs the consideration of what othe rmechanisms may be at play in order ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ramirez et al.: 2013 and 2015 Papers

By
In these papers, Ramirez et al. strive to understand how memory encoding via optogenetic manipulation of engram-bearing cells in the hippocampus, specifically the dentate gyrus, can affect an animal’s response to a stressful context.  The first paper, published in 2013, was crucial to the field as it introduced this very exciting technique; in this paper, Ramirez et al. use tet-tag to manipulate brain circuity and establish associations between two contexts. Throughout the paper, this is referred to as “false memories.” Using these artificial memories, the investigators are able to manipulate the animal’s fear response in a specific context. Specifically, after the animals are conditioned to a repeated fearful stimulus (a foot shock, in context B), activation of the involved DG cells in a different context (context A’) will also initiate a fear response (in absence of any foot shock). In this experiment, the false memory is used to create an unnatural fear association in a given...
Post a Comment
Read more