User:Riasood21/sandbox1

For the Epigenetics of Cocaine Addiction wikipedia page, I would make a few edits. The page does a good job of explaining the role of various epigenetic causes of cocaine addiction. It goes into detail about HDAC activity in cocaine users. It also talks about how the H3K9 position is shown to be altered in many cocaine users and the implications of this. In order to edit this article, I would add more to the general description of cocaine and epigenetics at the top of the article. I think this part is a little bit short, and I think it would be good to add more about what epigenetics is and how it is related to drug use in general. All abused drugs target the mesolimbic dopamine circuitry, which reinforces activities that are important for survival and reproduction. The nucleus accumbens is a big part of this circuitry and all abused drugs acutely increase dopaminergic neurotransmission in the nucleus accumbens. I think giving this background and explaining the shared properties of drug abuse could give some really important background and increase the depth of this article. This helps give the reader more context and makes the article more readable in general. In the review article I found, there is a lot more detail about general alterations to brain structure and transcription factors related to gene expression. Particularly, psychostimulants and opioids tend to increase histone acetylation levels by increasing cellular levels of HATs. Conversely, cocaine abuse increases cellular histone acetylation by limiting the capacity of enzymes to reduce histone acetylation. These opposing phenomena have the same ultimate effect. There is also a lot of information on how over-expression of different transcriptional factors can have opposing effects on the rewarding properties of cocaine. Specifically, over-expression of the transcription factor CREB reduces the rewarding properties of cocaine, whereas over-expression of the transcription factor FosB increases the rewarding properties of cocaine. A figure that displays all of those could be a relevant addition that helps the reader visualize this better. Overall, I would add more background information and more details on different transcriptional factors that are affected by cocaine use. Adding some figures would make this article even easier to understand, and I think there’s a lot of details that could be added to make this article more comprehensive.

Review article: Epigenetics of addiction

For the Epigenetics of Depression wikipedia page, I would also make a few edits. The article goes into good detail about how epigenetics and depression are related. Specfically, HDACs play an important role and respond differently to depression in different parts of the body. Additionally, it talks about how chronic stress can decrease the amount of HMT. Based on the review article I have chosen, I would go into more detail about how recently, researchers have found that miRNA expression was decreased in depressed individuals. I would also link depression to stress and early life stress heavily since there's a strong correlation. Additionally, I think the wikipedia article goes spends too much time on treatment, so I would make sure to explain the actual link between epigenetics and depression in greater depth. The relationship between miRNA expression and depression seems to be relatively newer research so I would make sure to add a good section explaining that relationship.