Baby Rat Summary

This article is about whether a person's psychological and behavioral tendencies are established by traumatic events an ancestor has been through. A molecular biologist, Moshe Szyf, and a neurobiologist, Michael Meany, began to experiment on mother rats to determine if postnatal inheritance had an effect on an animals' glucocorticoid receptors. The findings were quite interesting, baby rats with good mothering had the normal number of glucocorticoid receptors unlike the baby rats with bad mothering who lacked the sufficient number of glucocorticoid receptors. In order to prove their theory, Meany performed a second experiment. The baby rats were switched from their original attentive mothers to inattentive mothers and vice versa. Once again,

the findings were as predicted and the baby rats given to inattentive mothers grew up to lack the required number of glucocorticoid receptors. But just before publishing anything a third experiment was conducted and this time trichostatin was used. Trichostatin is a drug used for the removal of methyl groups. Meany and Szyf injected the drug directly into the rats' brain, the rats with low glucocorticoid receptors, and like a system reboot the rats level of glucocorticoid receptors leveled out to the normal number required.  
To me, the article was quite fascinating with all the new information I had no knowledge about. To know that a mother's behavior can cause epigenetic changes in a child is quite interesting. That solely due to a child's upbringing new genetic attachments are gained. This couple of experiments are intriguing because a good role model can cause such an enormous and important role in the brain development and neural communication to function effectively. In the article, there are more experiments on rats with a "loser male rat" impregnating the female rat and the offspring being depressed, and an artificial insemination of a female rat with no knowledge of the male counterpart with the offspring having no behavioral abnormalities. This comes to show that affected genes are able to make it past future generations resulting with the alteration of traits. Future experiments are being conducted and planned to discover how to "reboot" those affected genes.