In this Newsletter issue, we introduce a new section – the ‘Educational Corner’.

At regular intervals, we will select a published paper that our readers may use themselves or suggest to their students for self-studying or Journal Club discussions. We will try to select publications that represent interesting areas of science where it may be particularly important to understand how robust the published evidence actually is.
We encourage our readers to send us comments and analyses of these papers and the most interesting feedback will be shared in the next NL issue(s).

For this issue, we chose the paper from Qu et al. (Scientific Reports 2017, Vol 7, Article number: 15725) about the gut microbiota and its role in the mechanisms underlying the antidepressant actions of (R)-ketamine and lanicemine in a chronic social defeat stress model. We realize that this paper may have been published in a journal that does not endorse the highest publication standards (LINK) but nevertheless found the subject exciting and the paper itself a good example to have a discussion with students, postdocs and other colleagues.