Ayahn et al. (2011) & Burrows et al. (2015)

The paper by Ayahn et al. (2011) in my opinion was a bit messily done. I found some flaws in the design of the paper that were repellant such as missing punctuation, lack of definition of terms, and lack of adequate description of figures. Though these things seem minor, in Figure 6 they say they’re evaluating “cortex,” but not which cortex they are analyzing. In addition, I thought it odd that they explained DISC1 in so much depth throughout the paper, then for Figure 6, they introduced two completely novel genes (LIS1 and NDEL1) with not even the slightest bit of explanation of their pertinence to their hypothesis. Despite these distractions, the paper was sound in experimental design. They uncovered a lot of interactions between DISC1 expression and timing and presented them as clearly as possible in Table 1 (which I very much appreciated). I think the most appropriate next steps in this research would be to expand the study to adolescents and adults to really outline a timeline for changes due to DISC1 well. I thought the paper by Burrows et al. (2012) was short, but not so sweet. I liked this paper to a point, but it did not grab my attention and make me excited about the research as I normally am while reading scientific research. What they examined was interesting, but from the beginning I was thinking “So what?” I do think, despite my feelings, that it has definite applications in the field of schizophrenia research. It adds another piece to the pool of evidence surrounding glutamate’s role in the disorder, and is a great springboard for other research. Something that I found odd was that in Figure 2b, they did not express significance (or lack thereof) between KOEE and either of the wild type environments, which I would have found to be the most interesting part of the research. It would have shown the effect of EE on a genetically based problem, which is likely the most translatable principle of the study.