Biopsych seminar 2020

I am going to write my final paper on the sex differences of addiction in rodent models. Differences in symptoms and experiences between biological sexes is the part of neuroscience (and medicine) that I find most fascinating. In humans, it is difficult and almost impossible to attribute certain sex differences we see between males and females to nature or nurture. Although is generally accepted that many characteristics, particularly relating to neuroscience and psychiatric disorders, are due to a combination of nature and nurture, the distinction can be more easily facilitated by studying rodents in a controlled environment. On a similar note, mental disorders like addition are unfortunately still regarded with a certain amount of stigma. Studying addition in animal models works to lesson that stigma and prove that addiction has real, tangible, biological signs and symptoms. I am particularly interested if male versus female rodents are more susceptible to addictive behaviors, how t...

I am planning to focus my final paper on examining the effects of manipulating different regions of the engram on anxiety-like behaviors. We covered a few papers earlier in the semester dealing with finding the memory trace, primarily through optogenetic manipulation of hippocampal cells. This research is really important because it has potential clinical implications for anxiety, PTSD, and phobias. The papers I have selected so far use opto to manipulate different hippocampal and amygdala neurons involved in fear learning, consolidation, retrieval, extinction, and re-learning. I'm interested in comparing how manipulating different phases of the memory trace have different effects on the duration of a fear memory (and anxiety-like response) and the ability for extinction to be reversed and the fearful trace reactivated. I also tried to select articles that studied both male and female animals, however one that I included studies only males. When I actually write my paper, hopeful...

Throughout our course this semester, I’ve found that I have a strong interest in sex differences in rodent models of depression and anxiety and the validity of behavioral tests. In each paper we’ve read and discussed, I’ve paid particular attention to whether or not both male and female animals are used and how closely the behaviors they test seem to represent anxiety and/or depression. While some neurological and hormonal/chemical methods for assessing anxiety in these animals have been identified that parallel those in humans, I am especially interested in how these changes can manifest as behaviors that we can align with our own. For these reasons, I have chosen to write a review of behavioral sex differences in rodent models of anxiety for my final paper. I plan to use existing literature to investigate the efficacy of different stress paradigms in inducing anxiety in male vs. female rodents, the differences in behavioral responses of males and females to existing tests of anxiet...

For my final paper, I am interested in researching addiction behavior and specifically how well the paradigm of sign-tracking versus goal-tracking behavior models addiction. Of course, addiction is an extremely complex and multifaceted disorder to study and understand. With this in mind, I am aiming to isolate this specific behavior paradigm and evaluate 1) differences in how it is performed in animals, 2) the similarities or dissimilarities between conclusions across various studies as to what the paradigm represents and 3) its construct validity in modeling and/or predicting addiction behavior between animals and humans.   The task in [1] involved a lever being pressed for food delivery. Sign-trackers primarily approached and contacted the lever (the input) while goal-trackers preferentially approached the site of food delivery (the output). When later trained on a choice task between receiving food or an infusion of cocaine, sign-trackers chose cocaine over food significant...

I am going to be writing my paper of on dual glutamatergic-GABAergic neurons and propose how these neurons might affect different depressive behavioral phenotypes based on their distribution in the brain. It is more widely accepted the neurons only release one type of neurotransmitter. However, recent studies have shown that this might not be true; that neurons can co-release neurotransmitters. One of the first papers to propose the neurons could co-release neurotransmitters was Corelease of Two Fast Neurotransmitters at a Central Synapse by Jonas et al. (1998), which used paired recording from synaptically connected neurons in spinal cord slices to determine that spinal interneurons were releasing both glycine and GABA. Since this time, several papers have come out in support of the concept of  neurons co-releasing neurotransmitter including Ottem et al. (2004) which explored the role of the neurotransmitters I am more specifically interested in, dual glutamatergic-GABAergic neu...

Schizophrenia is a disorder of high complexity in which many neural pathways present aberrant signaling. ­­­In fact, this is true in the symptoms that are presented as it is arguably one of the most heterogenous disorders, with symptoms ranging from hallucinations to flat affect. As changes in the dopaminergic, serotonergic, cholinergic, glutamatergic, and GABAergic systems are present, not one singular factor has been identified as the root cause. On a more macroscopic scale, structural abnormalities are seen such as decreased brain volumes and enlarged ventricles 1 .              Currently, there is no singular genetic variant or environmental factor in which the development of schizophrenia can be attributed. Rather, the prevailing understanding is that schizophrenia arises through sets of gene by environment interactions over long periods of time. Being that the pathophysiology is so heterogeneous in systems as we...

The mental illness I’d like to focus on for my final paper is bipolar disorder. It’s one that we haven’t fully touched on in class. We spent a few weeks discussing depression but haven’t discussed mania yet. Learning about mania after learning about depression would be interesting because then I could think about how they might relate and be two different extremes of the same neurological processes. I would like to learn more about the biological basis of mania and also how it combines with depression to create the cycles of depressive and manic episodes. It’s also a mental disorder that I’ve seen portrayed in several shows that I’ve watched lately like Modern Love and Spinning Out. I’d like to take this opportunity to learn more about the mental illness in general to see if the popular culture portrayals of the illness are accurate. Behavioural sensitization to repeated sleep deprivation in a mice model of mania. (2008) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17950929 Lateral hyp...