Biopsych seminar 2020

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 ...

While I have not encountered a lot of gut-brain interaction literature yet. I found each paper unique and fascinating. Reber et al felt inaccessible for me. I felt like I didn’t understand what the goal of the paper really was and why they did the tests that they did. It seems like most of their relevant information got shoved into numerous supplementary figures and their behavior was quite difficult to follow. Multiple sections of their paper were supported with data found entirely in supplementary figures, which makes it difficult to follow the same conclusions. I have a few issues with the behavior they chose and because of this, I struggle to find driving conclusions from their work. I don’t understand why the CSC was not only the prior stressor but was also the acute stress condition both groups faced. To me, I feel like it would have made more sense to have the CSC be the prior stressor and then judge the effect on social behavior with maybe a three choice chamber test or te...

Buffington (2016) In the figures for experiments that measure interaction time, the authors included a graph for contact duration in addition to interaction time but they don’t mention contact duration in the text. What’s the relevance of contact duration here/what does it add? The results appear relatively consistent with the results of interaction time. I don’t think that the authors would waste previous figure space on graphs that don’t add any value. I thought the sociability vs. social novelty tests were interesting. I don’t know much about mice so I was a bit surprised that they prefer a new mouse over a familiar mouse. I would have expected them to prefer spending time with a familiar mouse but I guess it makes sense if they want to explore and investigate this novel mouse that has just entered their space. In the experiment examining the effect of social interaction on long-term potentiation in VTA DA neurons, the results show that interaction with an unfamiliar mouse trigger...

While I am far from an expert on it, the gut-brain axis is one of the topics that is most fascinating to me in neuroscience today. Philosophers have argued for hundreds of years whether or not the body and the mind are connected, and the influence of the gut on mental health and vice versa seems to be key evidence that they are. I was excited to have the opportunity to learn more about these brain-gut interactions through Buffington et al. (2016) and Reber et al. (2016) this week, particularly in considering how the results of these experiments could point to treatments that are relatively easily translatable for humans.   Due to my interest in the application of information about the gut-brain axis to human subjects, I put a lot of thought into what these papers may mean for the future of treatment and prevention of neurodevelopmental and anxiety disorders. Taking both papers into consideration, I wondered about the differences in the emergence of stress-related mental i...

I was very interested in going into this week's papers as through my time as a BNS student I have not encountered anything to do with the gut microbiome or the brain gut interaction. Reber et al. 2016 provided an expansive look at the effects of bacterial immunization on stress resilience in mice. However, I felt as though I left the paper with more questions than when I began reading it. Although they showed various ways in which the mice housed under the chronic stress paradigm improved in terms of proactive coping and decreased stress induced colitis, they also glazed over many behavioral paradigms looking at stress and anxiety that did not show consistent results. The connection of immunization using heat killed M. vaccae was also used to study the effects on microglia and the serotonergic system. Although this provides insight to how the effect of immunization can be used as a therapeutic or preventative measure, there was no real rhyme or reason as to why they looked at the...

The papers for this week aimed to investigate the role of the gut-brain axis in stress and neurodevelopmental disorders. While we know that our microbiome influences brain function and certainly has some down-stream effects on behavior, the exact mechanisms by which this happens are complex and still not fully understood.  Reber et al. demonstrated that immunization with an immunoregulatory environmental microorganism ( M. vaccae ) can rescue a stress phenotype induced with subordinate colony housing. I found the data in this paper very compelling, and the data clearly shows that immunized mice exhibit many more “proactive” behaviors than non-immunized mice, but I did wonder if there was a way to get a more complete picture of dominance status. Here, they compared the number of proactive behaviors (attacks, chasing) to reactive behaviors (flight, avoiding), to determine the dominance score of every animal. However, they only did this with male mice with other male aggressors, ...

            The papers this week were extremely interesting. I have very little knowledge about how our gut microbiome affects us, so these papers were quite shocking to me. The Buffington paper especially, stood out. It was well organized, well explained, and I am completely in agreement with the conclusions. Developing a non-invasive treatment for patients through probiotics would be amazing. More research obviously needs to be done, but I think this paper does a good job at establishing how one species of bacteria can affect the whole organism. I liked how the researchers brought in ASD because it was very clear what the clinical significance of this paper is. Since an increasingly amount of people in the United States are becoming obese, this topic is currently very relevant as well. Since rodents and people are different, I’d be very curious to see what the comparison of the gut microbiome is between humans with high fat diets compared to low fat...