Dr. Palmer gives talk at RSA in San Antonio, TX

Dr. Palmer gave a talk during the 49th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Research Society on Alcohol (RSA) on June 21, 2026 in San Antonio, Texas. (See the photos from RSA in the Photo Gallery)

Dr. Palmer's talk, "Using every part of the buffalo: how a large rodent genetics project encouraged spinoffs, collaborations and secondary data analyses," was part of the round table session titled "From Biobanks to Behavior: How Shared Bioresources and Genetic Pipelines Drive Ethical Innovation in Preclinical Alcohol Research," organized by Dr. Jennifer Rinker (Medical University of South Carolina).

In his talk, Dr. Palmer discussed the Center for Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics of Substance Use Disorders in Outbred Rats (ratgenes.org), which uses outbred heterogeneous stock (HS) rats and focuses on performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for addiction-related traits. Collaborations with the center have included projects on microbiome, metabolome, eye, muscle, bone and skull, kidney, liver, spleen and adipose traits with researchers who use data or tissues collected from HS rats after behavioral testing. The center has enabled secondary analyses and spinoff projects by carefully documenting raw data and using previously-collected data to train models for genetic prediction of behavioral and gene expression traits—a project we call RATTACA.

Find out more about RATTACA at our center's website. (ratgenes.org/rattaca)

Watch our recent videos on YouTube which explain the HS rats research work we do at Palmer Lab! (youtube.com/@RatGenes)