br4in5

A small penis of pepper.

Well, what were you expecting in response to this? Sure, it's kind of "cue-card"...but he didn't really dodge the question, which was itself fairly open-ended: he thinks it's gone too far and thus doesn't believe they're operating properly and within the letter of the law. Did you want a long, passionate expository on how it's raping the Constitution or how Obama should be put on trial or something?

I have a few methodological/design questions! To preface, I'm a fellow PhD student, so greetings, fellow impoverished workhorse =). Also, I'm a functional MRI guy, so some of my questions may arise from ignorance of some of the techniques.

1) Are you at all concerned about whether c-fos expression has different temporal profiles across the regions you examined? Put another way, do you feel that the same sac and slice protocol equally captures c-fos expression across these regions? The reason I ask is because previous work has shown that c-fos expression has different temporal profiles in different subfields of the hippocampus (sorry, I'm not on my work computer so I don't have the citation handy), so it stands to reason that the hypothalamus and amygdala may also show this discrepancy.

2) In your data (Fig. 1), it appears you're testing for significance against a threshold. Following a significant ANOVA, you seem to have done post hoc t-tests to compare individual datapoints (e.g., BLA vs. threshold). Did you correct for multiple comparisons? I'm not trying to be a stickler, but some of your significance values in the p=0.02-0.04 range might not survive familywise correction, and I'm wondering whether you considered this.

3) Did you do any behavioral testing in this experiment? Sorry if this is obvious, but I didn't see this in the paper...I may have just dummied up and overlooked it. If not, it may be a powerful next step to first show the behavioral consequences of infection and follow up with indices of change in neural activity.

Thanks! Cool paper. I like PLOS ONE a lot...haven't submitted there yet, but I would really like to someday. I hear their review process is a relief compared to most journals.

Hey, thanks for answering (and so thoroughly)! I wasn't trying to hold you over a fire about any of that, so I hope you didn't feel that way - just legitimate curiosity! Best of luck with your defense, good sir.