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Venniro et al. (2018) & De Guglielmo et al. (2019)

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Venniro et al. (2018) is my favorite paper of any we have read thus far in class. In part because of how blunt it is in calling out neuroscientific research’s deficits in studying the social aspect of addiction (I for some reason found this very humorous), but mainly because I could see just exactly how translational this research is. It is pretty amazing that they were able to show that rats prefer social interaction over self-administration of meth or heroin; I found it especially interesting in the context of animal receiving a punishment. It made me think about how if a support structure in humans is not rewarding enough, then someone might self-administer. Some ideas this gave me about additional experiments that might provide even more information about the social aspect of addiction were to have the ‘social partner’ instead be an aggressor to see if making the relationship even less rewarding would make the rat want to self-administer or if it is just the social interaction in general, regardless of whether it is healthy, that is driving the rat to not administer and abstain. Another interesting experiment could be to have the ‘social partner’ be a rat that is an addict. Would this influence the rat to ditch their friend and go self-administer?
De Guglielmo et al. (2019) I felt was less translational but still a solid paper. I think it would be cool to see if they could use a pharmacological manipulation instead of optogenetic inhibition as that would be more applicable to humans but this paper provides a good baseline. Also I would have like to see other evaluations of anxiety-like behaviors (it seems they on performed an open field apparatus) because from my understanding CRF plays a big role in stress response and that can cause significant changes in anxiety levels so it would have been to see support of this.

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