Vassoler et al

Vassoler et al studied paternal role on offspring sex difference on behavioral effects such as cocaine self administration and biochemical differences such as gene expression.  Male rats self administered cocaine for 60 days which is the length of spermatogenesis. Then, when the offspring were 60 days of age they implanted the catheters that were then used to self administer cocaine.  They noticed different results for females than for males, which again is something that highly interests me.

Female groups of saline parents and cocaine parents didn't show difference in cocaine infusions.  Moreover, males from cocaine parents did show delayed acquisition in cocaine infusions, which originally didn't make sense to me.  I would have thought that they would crave cocaine more than those completely naive to the drug. However, one of their first explanations to this phenomenon was the fact that maybe these cocaine sires offspring had impairments in learning abilities. Once again, I really did not expect to see more BDNF in the Coc-sired than it the Sal-sired groups.  I would expect them to have either similar, or less levels of BDNF in the Coc-sired. Also, there was a difference in the males but not in the females.  I would like to see further studies of this and see what underlies the difference.

Something that I did not love about this paper was the fact that the analyses were done in groups, rather than in the individuals as we saw in the Holly et al cocaine paper last week.  It would have been interesting to the see the difference from baseline levels in the individuals.