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Both Buffing et al. (2016) and Reber et al. (2016)  align very much with my current research interests: everything and anything involving the gut-brain axis. This interest was spurred by a class I have mentioned in several of my blog posts thus far: Brain, Behavior and Immunity. The knowledge that I gained from this class allowed me to have a more insightful perspective when reading these papers.
Having read a decent amount of papers about the gut-brain axis, something that particularly stood out to me in the Buffing et al. (2016)  paper was social interaction not inducing LTP in the VTA of the maternal high-fat diet offspring. I thought it was interesting that they tied social interaction to the VTA which I usually think about more with physical rewards rather than social. Something I was thinking about while reading this is what nutrients were the mice on the high-fat diet deficient in? Do we even have a way of quantifying mice as nutrient deficient? Is it the fat of the diet that is causing issues or is it the lack of other nutrients?
The article also mentions “more frequent spontaneous abortion in obese mothers” which lead me to question why this might be? Is this a result of the obese mothers having issues with their immune systems making changes to accept the DNA of the fetus (something learned in BBI) or is it more related to the body being under greater stress in general?
In the Reber et al. paper (2016), I thought it would have been interesting if they had investigated the transgenerational effects of stress and stress resilience in mice (a thought I had in relation to how the Buffering et al. paper studied maternal activity having an effect on the offspring). Would we continue to see this stress reduction across generations? These two papers were the perfect way to end our semester!

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