Category Archive for : ‘P50 NIDA Center of Excellence’

…we are pleased to celebrate the 100th generation of HS Rats!

Palmer Lab has marked this momentous occasion with festivities at a few recent events.

The 9th Annual Retreat for the P50 Center for Genetic Studies of Drug Abuse in Outbred Rats was a success! The Retreat was held on Friday, October 27, 2023 at the University of California San Diego.

Thank you to all who attended in person and remotely on Zoom! We hope you found the talks informative and made connections with new HS rats/GWAS colleagues.

We are pleased to announce the upcoming 9th (and final) Annual Retreat for the P50 Center for Genetic Studies of Drug Abuse in Outbred Rats!

The Retreat will take place on Friday, October 27, 2023 at the University of California San Diego.

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.

Dr. Palmer presented at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Center of Excellence in the Omics, Systems Genetics and the Addictome (OSGA) Webinar Series. His talk, “From GWAS to gene: What are the essential analyses and how do we bring them together using heterogeneous stock rats?”, describes the tools to analyze GWAS in HS rats and the automated pipeline that performs GWAS in HS rats. Furthermore, this talk explains the role of fine mapping of associated regions and the use of secondary analyses to prioritize genes in associated intervals.

The 5th Annual Retreat for the NIDA Center for GWAS in Outbred Rats (Director – Dr. Palmer) was held on June 12, 2019. 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. The Advisory Board had a closed-door meeting to provide feedback to Dr. Palmer.

The NIDA Genetics Consortium meeting was held on Saturday June 16th on the UCSD campus at the Medical Education and Telemedicine Building. Speakers from all over the world came to discuss recent advances in genetics and genomics as well as the genetics of substance abuse and addiction. See the full schedule here!

Dr. Abraham Palmer presented a talk titled, “Strategies to dissect the genetics of various phenotypes associated with SUD from multiple species: Are we measuring the right phenotype?”

Dr. Amelie Baud has joined the Palmer Lab! She is a Sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellow at EMBL – EBI in the UK and Visiting Scholar at UCSD. Amelie’s research focuses on understanding how genetic variants in an individual can influence traits of another individual (social genetic effects, SGE). In the Palmer Lab she will be investigating whether the gut microbiome mediates SGE using data from the P50 Heterogeneous Stock rats project. Welcome to the lab, Amelie!

Daniel Liu, a student from Torrey Pines High School, participated in the Research Experiences for High School and Undergraduate Students (REHU) program funded by the P50 Center (P50DA037844, “Integrated GWAS of complex behavioral and gene expression traits in outbred rats”). Daniel worked with Dr. Jianjun Gao on developing new software to process sequencing data for the Genotyping-by-Sequencing method. He wrote a research paper titled ” FastQParse: An Integrated Toolkit for Preprocessing Sequenced Reads” and also presented his work at the REHU Symposium which was held at the University of Chicago.

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The P50 Center’s proposal, titled “Genome-wide mapping of gene-microbiome interaction: implication in behavior”, has been selected for funding by the UC San Diego’s Center for Microbiome Innovation. The purpose of these seed grants is to jump start microbiome research in San Diego and spark new research collaborations.

The NIDA National Center of Excellence for Genome-Wide Association Studies in Outbred Rats (P50DA037844) was founded in 2014 to utilize cutting-edge genetic methods to elucidate the genetics of drug abuse-related behaviors in rats. Dr. Abraham Palmer is the Center’s Director.