Energize
| 30 June, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
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Ever wondered just what the heck is going on?
Elly Strammer had one of those moments reading the comments on an article first evaluated by Yehezkel Ben-Ari at the Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée, France. The article, Spontaneous network events driven by depolarizing GABA action in neonatal hippocampal slices are not attributable to deficient mitochondrial energy metabolism, appears to focus on the role of lactate (versus glucose) in the hippocampus, and how levels and neurotransmitter actions are measured.
I’m certainly not clear what’s being said, claimed or refuted, but would appreciate a clear explanation. I’m sure Elly would, too.
F1000 Member Ferdinando Boero has also been exercised regarding an evaluation on F1000. This time, it’s about a stunning experimental perturbation of a lake in northern Wisconsin. The clever bit of the paper is that there was a control lake right next door. While Nando agrees this is a “very fine paper,” he does wonder about the statistical significance of one experimental and one control. Obviously it’s difficult to add more lakes to a Terran experiment, but we can get some useful information from these systems.
Indeed, Nando echoes Rutherford, saying “Statistics helps, but it cannot become a dictator.”
What do you say?
(and, PS. If you want to check out what people are saying across the whole of F1000, this handy link will show you all the evaluations that have comments.)
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In fact, Richard, I can give you a clear explanation. A 20 year long dogma about excitatory GABA in neonatal brain turns out to be based on wrong methods. Ivanov et al., 2011 directly measured metabolic features under influence of energy substrates. You are right, lactate vs glucose, but also what really is known to be present in immature neurons’ milieu and what was absent in the experiments showing GABA to be exitatory: beta-hydroxybutyrate. In this article, Ivanov et al., explained what else is wrong with the method, the level of oxygenation is too low for neurons to function properly.
As Karl Kasischke wrote in his comment on Ivanov et al., 2011, “An important implication of this methodological tour de force is that under many previously reported experiments the requirements for viability may been met while the functionality may have been compromised.”
Its’ easy to see that Y Zilberter tried to set things straight and that Y Ben-Ari ignored it in his two comments repeating all old stuff about non-metabolic effects of energy substrates. I tried to contribute to the discussion but obviously failed. I approved removal of my comment you refer to in your post since I was told that the authors would take care of the issue.
Citations
Kasischke K (2011) Lactate fuels the neonatal brain. Front. Neuroenerg. 3:4. doi: 10.3389/fnene.2011.00004
Ivanov, A., Mukhtarov, M., Bregestovski, P., and Zilberter, Y. (2011). Lactate effectively covers energy demands during neuronal network activity in neonatal hippocampal slices. Front. Neuroenerg. 3:2. doi: 10.3389/fnene.2011.00002
Thanks for that, Ellen. I appreciate you taking the time to comment (and sorry about the mess over at the original evaluation–we had some tech issues and were trying to tidy it up).