Kellendonk et al.

I really enjoyed reading the Kellendonk et al. article. Although I did not find all the results that convincing, I really enjoyed the behavioral experiments that they did with the various mazes and how they could link the results from the maze experiments to the similar behavioral outputs you would typically see in an individual with schizophrenia.

The reason that I did not find a lot of the results convincing is that there were no real significant differences in the behavioral tests. They mention “trends” with no significant effect, which I thought was not all too convincing. For example, in Figure 2, the article mentions that there is a trend in the saturation binding analyses with the D2 receptor antagonist with the gene on but there was significant difference, which I thought would have been a very convincing result had they achieved it.

The article made reference to their error bars which then actually made me pay attention to them, more so than I would have before. These were rather large in some areas, making me a little more unsure of the validity of the results. Also, along with this, the experiments used a significant number of mice, therefore there was no issue with the possibility of few mice inhibiting their results, there was just simply no trend in many areas.

One small point I wanted to mention, was I liked the way in which they included an extra control group in Figure 5 (C+D) to show whether the treatment of Dox itself could have affected the results.

Overall, although I found many aspects of Moore et al.’s article to be more convincing in their results, the Kellondonk et al. article was my favorite as I enjoyed learning more about the really interesting behavioral experiments they did.