Ayhan: Time matters.

Last week Kellendonk and Moore introduced the temporal importance of development on schizophrenia. After reading those papers it appeared that there must be something going on early in development, that once initiated or created, remains latent until later on after puberty. Ayhan et al focused their paper on delving into a particular mutant protein, hDISC1. They were able to express the mutant protein at specific times during development using the DOX diet as we have previously seen. When reading the methods of the protocol, it seemed like there could be some pretty interesting results. Maybe the different temporally expressed mutant protein will show us some cool histochemical, brain imaging, or protein distributions in schizophrenia phenotype mice. But the results were rather underwhelming. Most of the significant findings were with in the PRE+POST group of mice, so these mice expressed the mutant during development and all the way through the behavioral testing and sacrifice for imaging. This was kind of like, “duh” if you express a mutant protein for that long, obviously you are going to see some significant results. I feel that the results did not do a whole lot at targeting what is going on developmentally with schizophrenic patients, they kind of just confirmed that PRE birth is important, as well as POST birth development.

These folks did something that we haven’t really seen much yet in our papers so far, by discriminating between male and female mice. Ayhan et al took a look at the gender differences, but represented there data in a weird way. In Figure 2 they bounce around between males and females depending on the test. For example, the social interaction test data was only shown for males and the FST only showed female data. This was kind of confusing because they didn’t show the contrasting data between the genders, they only showed the significant data. It was particularly interesting about these findings that there were no major differences in brain morphology or protein distribution between females and males, but there were behavioral differences found. These results really beg the question of what is it then that is creating these gender differences. We know that males and females mature at different rates, could the difference in rate of development play a role?