On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast

We’re changing things up this week at On Your Mind and taking a more critical look at a paper that we’ve developed strong opinions about.  From the unnecessarily long title to the unfortunate lack of controls, we’ve got alot to say about “Reelin, an extracellular matrix protein linked to early onset psychiatric diseases, drives postnatal development of the prefrontal cortex via GluN2B-NMDARs and the mTOR pathway” by Iafrati et al. (doi: 10.1038/mp.2013.66).  On the upside, this article is open access so we encourage you to download it and form your own opinions.  The authors do a series of behavioural, electrophysiological and pharmacological experiments using a mouse model that’s heterozygous for a functioning reelin gene.  Reelin is a protein that’s involved in guiding neural progenitors to their final destination, and seems to influence the maturation of NMDA receptors.  It has also been indirectly associated with a number of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.  Mice that are heterozygous for r