Week 7: Ayhan and Burrows

I really enjoyed reading both of these articles. I thought that they were relatively straight forward and easy to comprehend, which may just be due to the nature of the material. I have found that some previous papers were extremely technical, where these were significantly easier to tease apart. Out of the two, I found the Ayhan paper to be the more interesting. I think this had to do with the fact that the mutant DISC1 experiments done in these mice have so many correlations to studies done on schizophrenic patients, and because of that I could relate a lot of my previous studies to this paper.

That being said, there was one thing in this paper that I think would need more analysis in order to make the research stronger. One of the most interesting graphs of this paper was Figure 2g. This figure looked different then what we would expect, especially compared to Figure 2e, but also told a different story than what the paper was saying. The additional bar graph present showed that d-amphetamine had a significantly increased effect on locomotion, which the paper also cited, however that is not something that is seen in the line graph. To me, it actually looks like locomotion in the pre-and postnatal group were decreasing overtime. This may be due to a general increase in activity overtime, however there is a general downward trend observable in the line graph. This may be due to the different mechanism of action these drugs use, MK801 is a non-competitive NMDA antagonist, while d-amphetamine is an indirect dopamine agonist. So, it is possible that these differences may explain the weird graph that is present, but I think the author’s point would be significantly more clear if the results of this graph were explained more.