Week 9 Vassoler et al 2013

I found this paper to be very interesting right off the bat as the introduction spoke about the maternal and paternal effects of various circumstances, including cocaine administration. This is the first paper we've discussed regarding parental effects on offspring, and I am very intrigued by the entire field. Specifically, Vassoler et al. (2013) studied the paternal effects of cocaine self-administration on gene expression, chromatin remodeling, and cocaine reinforcement in the offspring. I don't know if this is typical of these types of studies, but I appreciated that they focused on paternal rather than maternal effects in this study to avoid influences of in utero cocaine and maternal behavior affected by cocaine. In that sense, the researchers seemed to cover their bases well. They were able to control for environmental factors, which is unavoidable in human studies, in order to show the strictly genetic basis for their results. However, since there are so many environmental factors in humans, this data must still be interpreted carefully, because it cannot provide the full story for humans.

I thought it was fascinating how Vassoler et al. suggested possible mechanisms for the results they found. They were able to show increased levels of BDNF in the mPFC as a possible mechanism for the drug resistant phenotype. This led me to think BDNF could be a possible treatment for cocaine addiction, but upon further research I found that BDNF plays a complex and varying role depending on brain area, cell type, and more. I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t quite as promising as I expected after reading Vassoler et al.’s research on it, but I did find that BDNF levels may be used as an indication of future relapse. Another interesting proposal by Vassoler et al. was in regards to the histone acetylation. They showed that this increases transcription, therefore enhancing BDNF levels. They also spoke about functional changes in the sperm and how it can affect the zygote and embryo.

All in all, I found this article to be very thought-provoking. As always, I’d like to see continued research in the field. Something they mentioned was the role of estrogen and progesterone in female cocaine behaviors, so perhaps they can yield significant results in female offspring if they take hormones into account. It would also be interesting if they could somehow add in other factors to make the circumstances more applicable to humans, but of course that would be challenging and it is always difficult to work with more than one variable.