Category Archive for : ‘Palmer Lab News’

Dr. Amanda Barkley-Levenson has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and will be starting in 2022. Her lab will work on understanding the genetic basis of alcohol use disorder and excessive drinking by translating novel hits from human GWAS into mouse models for comprehensive follow-up and validation.

Congratulations, Amanda!

Gabe Barrero joined the Palmer lab in November 2021 as an information system analyst with a Bachelor of arts in Biology. He is passionate about data science and its application in international development. In his free time Gabe enjoys Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, biking, cooking and ice cream.

Welcome, Gabe!

The article, “Evaluation of Delay Discounting as a Transdiagnostic Research Domain Criteria Indicator in 1388 General Community Adults” has been accepted for publication in Psychological Medicine. Drs. Abraham Palmer and Sandra Sanchez-Roige are co-authors along with several others. Congratulations!

Final citation: Levitt, E. E., Oshri, A., Amlung, M., Ray, L.A., Sanchez-Roige, S., Palmer, A.A., & MacKillop, J. (in press) Evaluation of Delay Discounting as a Transdiagnostic Research Domain Criteria Indicator in 1388 General Community Adults. Psychological Medicine.

The article, “Polygenic transcriptome risk scores (PTRS) can improve portability of polygenic risk scores across ancestries”, has recently been accepted for publication in Genome Biology. This study explores the use of polygenic transcriptome risk scores (PTRS) to improve the prediction of transcriptomic data in underrepresented populations. Dr. Abraham Palmer and several others coauthored this article. See the article here. Congratulations, Dr. Palmer!

The article, “Genes identified in rodent studies of alcohol intake are enriched for heritability of human substance use”, has been accepted for publication in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. This article discusses the use of GeneWeaver to enrich rodent alcohol & nicotine gene-sets for heritability of substance use traits in humans. Dr. Abraham Palmer and several others coauthored this article. See article here. Congratulations!

The 7th Annual Retreat for the NIDA Center for GWAS in Outbred Rats was held on 11/4/2021. Investigators from the P50 Center, as well as PIs of the grants affiliated with the Center, gave short talks about their projects, followed by discussion. A closed advisory board meeting was held the following day.

Master’s Student Elizabeth Alcantara was recently awarded the BrightSpinnaker Fellowship. This fellowship is awarded to students who demonstrate a commitment to community service and provides funding for the master’s program at UCSD.

Congratulations, Liz!

Elizabeth Alcantara joined the Palmer Lab in December of 2020 as an undergraduate volunteer and recently graduated from UCSD with a B.S in Neurobiology. She has recently been admitted to the UCSD BS/MS program and is now a Graduate Student Researcher in the lab. She will be focusing her work on investigating the relationship between Glo1 and drug addiction. In her free time, she enjoys eating out and trying new foods, reading, binge watching shows, and playing with her two cats.

Welcome, Liz!

Han Chen Joined the Palmer lab in September of 2021, he recently graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a B.S in Bioinformatics. His hobbies are playing tennis, cooking, and drawing.

Welcome, Han!

The manuscript , “Genome-wide association study of problematic opioid prescription use in 132,113 23andMe research participants of European ancestry”, has been provisionally accepted for publication in Molecular Psychiatry. Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige is the first author and Dr. Abraham Palmer is the last author; they are also co-corresponding authors. In addition, Mariela Jennings, Sevim Bianchi, and Yuye Huang, who are members of Dr. Sanchez-Roige’s lab, are co-authors. This study identified two genome wide significant loci associated with problematic opioid use (POU). Additional genetic correlations along with POU were found including alcohol dependence,