Zachary Tatom joined the Palmer Lab as a postdoctoral scholar in October 2024 after receiving his PhD in human and molecular genetics from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

Welcome, Zachary!

The manuscript titled ”PAGER: A Novel Genotype Encoding Strategy for Modeling Deviations from Additivity in Complex Trait Association Studies” was accepted in BioData Mining.

Authors include current Palmer Lab members Apurva S. Chitre and Abraham A. Palmer.

Congratulations!

Dr. Palmer was invited to give a talk at the University of California Irvine (UCI) for the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior’s ICAN seminar series, titled “Genetic approaches to understanding substance use disorders and other psychiatric and behavioral traits using humans and rodents,” held on campus at UCI on September 17, 2024.

The manuscript titled ”Y and Mitochondrial Chromosomes in the Heterogeneous Stock Rat Population” was accepted in G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics.

Authors include recent and current Palmer Lab members: Faith Okamoto, Apurva S Chitre, Thiago Missfeldt Sanches, Denghui Chen, Daniel Munro, Benjamin B Johnson, Khai-Minh H Nguyen, Oksana Polesskaya, and Abraham A Palmer.

Congratulations!

Joel will work on understanding the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes using sheep as animal models.

Congratulations, Joel!

The 10th Annual P50/P30 Retreat was held on Friday, September 6, 2024 at the University of California San Diego.

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

Presenters, talk recordings, and photos are available on the P50/P30 Center website. (ratgenes.org)

Dr. Palmer was invited to present at the third Gordon Research Conference (GRC) in Newry, Maine on August 18-23, 2024.

He gave a talk titled “Studying Intermediate Phenotypes to Elucidate the Genetic Basis of Substance Use Disorders” during the concurrent Neurobiology of Drug Addiction meeting.

The NIDA Core Center of Excellence grant titled, “Center for Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics of Substance Use Disorders in Outbred Rats,” has been awarded to Drs. Abraham Palmer, Pejman Mohammadi, Oksana Polesskaya, and Leah Solberg Woods. 

Congratulations!

Rudy started at the Palmer Lab as a Lab Assistant in August 2024.

Prior, he obtained a BS in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Johns Hopkins University.

Welcome, Rudy!

Sample duplicate and pedigree mix-up QCs use genetic kinship. There is a base level of relatedness among all HS rats from shared genetic history: outbred from eight inbred strains (Hansen and Spuhler 1984), then maintained as an intrabreeding population. Put blithely, everyone is everyone’s second cousin. Herein two methods to calculate genetic kinship are considered: KING robust coefficients and GRM off-diagonal values. Then, sample duplicates and pedigree discordance QCs for HS rats are developed.