Tye et al Quandaries

1. Go Patriots! I know that this blog post is late and I apologize. 
2. This set of papers was particularly interesting based on the main research technique. Before this class I had never heard of optogenetics and after learning about it I am very excited to be included within this particular field of science. 
3. This technique will prove to be very useful to the field of neuroscience and I look forward to seeing how it is applied in the future. I am a little skeptical, however, on the specific research methods exhibited thus far in both the Tye et al and Chaudhury et al papers. I consider the utilization of optogenetics to be a very advanced technique and I would expect published papers to be able to thoroughly explain the significance of results obtained from the use of this technique. I am impressed with a majority of the results obtained from the Tye et al paper, but my expectations are lacking at the same time. I wish that they had assessed some other models of depression instead of just the two which they did. It appears as if they have satisfied most of their hypotheses, but that is not necessary for an influential paper. 
4. Tye et al did a decent job in assessing depression models of depression among their mice by quantifying the levels of anhedonia and lack of motivation using the sucrose preference test, the tail suspension test and the forced swimming test respectively, but they could have looked into other aspects as well. For example, they could have looked into changes in the volume of the hippocampi of the mice exposed to chronic stress, or changes in sleep patterns in the mice (I believe that both of these characteristics are common in humans). 
5. I am not saying that either group did not do a decent job of looking into which topic they chose and they have certainly made some strides in the field, but there is always a lot more work to be done. I look forward to seeing what is accomplished in the future.