Vassoler et al. (2013)

The paper for this week by Vassoler et al. (2013) was extremely enjoyable to me. I found the basis of their research to be fascinating and very much enjoyed reading it. I have very little to pick at in regards to their experimental design, and think that this was a wonderful paper. Since I find epigenetics very interesting, examining how the changes can be passed to offspring seems to me to be an innovative and necessary field of research. I am unqualified to speculate in the field, but I would have hypothesized that they would find the opposite of their results: cocaine-sired offspring would have a higher susceptibility to cocaine dependence. Because of this, their results were extremely cool to me and I was surprised to see a result in only males. In the future, it would be great to see research going into the reasoning behind the sex differences seen here; possibly testosterone interaction or estrogen protection. Overall, my favorite part of the paper is an aspect they did not much highlight: there was no difference in H3 in the sperm of cocaine-experienced sires when compared to their saline control counterparts, but Figure 6h shows BDNF promoters with a significantly higher percent association with these histones in cocaine-experienced sires. This points out an important aspect of cocaine’s relationship with H3 in that cocaine is not simply causing an increase in these histones, but causing them in some way to be associated with BDNF promoters. More interesting follow-up research would be to determine where these H3’s are coming from and what is now lacking them. This might lead to another significant finding about the field of epigenetics and cocaine.