The article, “Goal/Sign-Tracking Phenotype Reveals Associations between Behavior and Microbiome in a Sex-Dependent Manner in the Rat,” has been accepted for publication in EBioMedicine. Dr. John Cryan and Dr. Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with Veronica Peterson, Jerry Richards, Raul Cabrerarubio, Oksana Polesskaya, Apurva Chitre, A. Baud, Fiona Crispie, Ted Dinan, Christopher King, Jordan Tripi, Thomaz Bastiaanssen, and Paul Meyer.

The goal of the center is to use outbred rats to study the genetic basis of drug self-administration and related behavioral traits. More information is available at www.ratgenes.org.

Drs. Amanda Barkley-Levenson and Dr. Abraham Palmer attended the Research Society on Alcoholism conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 22-26.

Amanda presented a poster titled, “Glyoxalase 1 and sensitivity to the motivational effects of ethanol.”

Abraham presented a talk titled, “Dissecting the genetics of alcohol Consumption and alcohol misuse, and overlap with alcohol dependence.” He also was a discussant for a symposium titled, “Using outbred N/NIH HS rats to perform GWAS for substance abuse-relevant traits.”

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.

On June 8-11, 2019, the Complex Traits Consortium (CTC) meeting was held at UCSD and hosted by Dr. Abraham Palmer.

The meeting covered quantitative approaches to mouse and rodent genetics. The meeting had three plenary speakers, a poster session, and many short talks that were drawn from submitted abstracts and organized thematically.

CTC talks from the Palmer Lab:
Abraham Palmer: “First five years of the NIDA Center for GWAS in Outbred Rats”
Apurva Chitre: “Genome wide association study in 3,173 outbred rats identifies 31 loci for body weight, body mass index, adiposity, and fasting

Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige had a healthy baby girl named Margot. Congratulations, Sandra!

Dr. Abraham Palmer visited the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was invited to be the keynote speaker for a graduate student conference.

The title of his talk was, “Quantitative behavioral genetics in mice, rats, and humans,” which highlighted his contributions to the field of behavioral genetics.

Apurva and Abraham attended the Addiction Genetics and Epigenetics Data Jamboree, May 29-31 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN.

This workshop, co-sponsored by NIDA and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, discussed challenge problems to integrate data across human and model organism genetics, genomics, and epigenetic studies of addiction.

On May 19th, 2019, Ariana Page married Trevor James at Leo Carrillo Ranch in Carlsbad, CA.

Congratulations, Ariana!

Dr. Amanda Barkley-Levenson gave a talk titled, “Glyoxalase 1 involvement in ethanol reward sensitivity and ethanol withdrawal” at the International Behavioral and Neural Genetics Society meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland.