On a visit to San Diego led by David Lerner, Program Director of Careers in Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago, a group of twenty University of Chicago undergraduate students had the opportunity for some career exploration in biological sciences while meeting at Palmer Lab at UC San Diego.

In a lunchtime presentation, Dr. Palmer gave the students a practical understanding of daily life in their field of interest. The visit was also designed to build connections between students, alumni, and professionals. Dr. Palmer was joined by fellow lab members

The Palmer Lab will be running a booth at Neuroscience 2022, hosted by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). This convention will be held at the San Diego Convention Center from November 12 – November 16, 2022.

Our booth, Center for GWAS in Outbred Rats, is located in Hall B, Booth #3229, and will be featuring our new RATTACA project. We hope to see you there!

The manuscript, “Hazardous Drinking and Alcohol Use Disorders,” has been accepted for publication in Nature Reviews Disease Primers. Dr. Abraham Palmer coauthored this article along with Drs. James MacKillop, Anne Lingford-Hughes, Markus Heilig, and several others.

Published: 22 December 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41572-022-00414-1

Thiago joined the Palmer Lab in October 2022 as an Information Systems Analyst. He received his PhD in Genomics from UCDavis with a specialization in Environmental DNA. His research interests involve data integration, graphs and inference. In his free time, Thiago enjoys cycling, playing with electronics, and breeding aquarium fish.

The 19th Annual Meeting of the Complex Trait Community (CTC) was held in collaboration with the Rat Genomics Community at the University of Colorado on September 29th and 30th, 2022. Palmer lab members, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Polesskaya, Apurva Chitre, Brittany Leger, and Denghui Chen had attended and presented in person. Post Docs Dan Munro and Joel Leal Gutierrez had attended and presented virtually.

See program details here!

The manuscript, “The regulatory landscape of multiple brain regions in outbred heterogeneous stock rats”, has been accepted for publication in Nucleic Acids Research. This study provides the most comprehensive mapping of gene regulatory variation in outbred rats to date and introduces the RatGTEx resource. Palmer lab members, Dan Munro, Apurva Chitre, Oksana Polesskaya, Jianjun Gao, and Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with several others.

See preprint here!

A new R01 grant titled, “A Framework for Translating Polygenic Findings Related to Alcohol Use Disorder Across Species”, has been awarded to Dr. Abraham Palmer as the Project Director. This 5 year grant incudes more than $2.7M starting September 16th, 2022 and ends on August 31st, 2027.

Congrats, Dr. Palmer!

The new NIDA U01 Grant, “Identification of Genetic Variants that Contribute to Compulsive Cocaine Intake in Rats”, has been awarded to Dr. Abraham Palmer and Dr. Olivier George. This grant will fund the behavioral characterization, biobanking, genotyping and GWAS analysis of 2,082 rats over 5 years. The first milestone for this grant is to implement raspberry pi monitoring systems into Dr. George’s machine-learning data pipeline.

Congratulations!

Dr. Abraham Palmer received the 2022 Health Sciences Faculty Excellence in Mentoring Award for outstanding mentorship of future leaders in academic medicine at UC San Diego.

Congratulations, Dr. Palmer!

The manuscript, “Parsing Genetically Influenced Risk Pathways: Genetic Loci Impact Problematic Alcohol Use Via Externalizing and Specific Risk”, was accepted for publication in Translational Psychiatry. This study investigates the use of multivariate methods to unravel variants associated with problematic alcohol use in order to characterize the pathways in which these variants operate. Drs. Abraham Palmer, Sandra Sanchez-Roige and several others are coauthors. See pre-print here!

Congratulations!