Week 7

I thought that what the Ayhan paper set out to do was very interesting, but I was kind of disappointed with their results, mostly because I was hoping for some more dramatic conclusions. I was hoping that only one of the two exposures (prenatal OR postnatal) would cause schizophrenic symptoms. However, from Table 1, it seems that prenatal or postnatal exposure to the mutant hDISC1 each bring about a few of the several schizophrenia symptoms, with postnatal exposure doing slightly more damage. One thing that I really appreciated about this paper was how the thorough and comprehensive list of both structural and behavioral changes they were observing in the mice. I do wish that pre-groups and post-groups experienced a change in dox on the same day, to eliminate the weird gap between E12 and E17 that researchers didn’t account for. I liked the noting of differences between male and female mice. Overall, I think this paper was really well done and I see potential for a lot of future directions, whether it be narrowing in on one of the several changes noted in table 1, investigating gender differences further, or playing around with the timeline of mutant hDISC1 presence.

I really appreciated the approach the Burrows et. al paper took on examining schizophrenia. I thought their research was very straightforward and the results were exactly what I expected. I would love to see somewhat of a combination of the two experiments, with the following experimental groups: (EE+ pre-natal, EE+ post-natal, EE+pre and post, EE+No and SH+pre-natal, SH+ post-natal, SH+ pre and post, SH+ No) I am curious to see if environmental enhancement could reverse the negative effects of the mutant hDISC1 gene, or vice versa.