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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.

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