Drs. Amelie Baud and Sandra Sanchez-Roige presented at the 2019 World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics in Los Angeles, CA earlier this week.

Dr. Baud presented a talk entitled “Genetic effects from the social environment” in which she presented evidence that mouse and rat behaviours relevant to psychiatric disorders can be affected not only by the animal’s own genes but also by genes of cage mates. She also illustrated how such “indirect genetic effects” can be leveraged to dissect the mechanisms of social effects, more precisely to identify traits of social partners

The article titled “Genome-wide associations reveal human-mouse genetic convergence and modifiers of myogenesis, CPNE1 and STC2” has been accepted for publication in The American Journal of Human Genetics. Drs. Palmer and Riyan Cheng are co-authors along with Arimantas Lionikas, Ana Isabel Hernández Cordero, Natalia Gonzales, Clarissa Parker, David John Vandenbergh, Mark Abney, Andrew Skol, Alex Douglas, and Jenny Gregory. Find  the full article here.

Dr. Palmer was recently quoted in an article about genes and personality in the German magazine “NZZ Folio.” Find the full article here.

Dr. Abraham Palmer was a panelist on the professional development workshop: Bringing Genetic Diversity to Neuroscientific Research at the 2019 Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. The title of his talk was “Genetic Diversity is All Around you!”

The article, “Recent efforts to dissect the genetic basis of alcohol use and abuse,” has been accepted for publication in Biological Psychiatry. Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige and Dr. Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with Toni Clarke. The paper can be found here.

Bonnie Lin joined the Palmer lab in August 2019 as a data analyst. She was born and raised in San Diego. She graduated from Amherst college with a background in statistics and neuroscience. Bonnie loves the process of using data and research to address health questions and disparities. In her free time, she’s happy to enjoy San Diego’s nice weather at home and to study MBTI types (she’s an ENTJ). Additionally, she likes almost all things “green”- matcha, being vegetarian, cycling, reducing waste, etc.

Welcome, Bonnie!

A recent study, “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior,” published in Science Magazine found that there is no single gene that leads to non-heterosexual behavior. The study was conducted by Dr. Andrea Ganna and colleagues.

KUSI News interviewed Dr. Abraham Palmer on what the study findings may mean. Dr. Palmer, who was not involved in the study, noted that researchers were able to identify “a few specific genes that influence non-heterosexual behavior in both men and women.” However, the study did not establish a way

The article, “Phenome-wide investigation of health outcomes associated with genetic predisposition to loneliness,” has been accepted for publication in Human Molecular Genetics. Dr. Abdel Abdellaoui and Dr. Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with Dorret Boomsma, Lea Davis, Stephanie Cacioppo, Karin Verweij, Yi Lu, Nancy Pedersen, Ingrid Szilagyi, Henning Tiemeier, Alexandra Neumann, Miriam Mosing, A.H.M. Willemsen, Jouke- Jan Hottenga, Hill Ip, Michel Nivard, Jorien Treur, Damiaan Denys,  Cornelia van Duijn, Najaf Amin, Bart Baselmans, Mathijs van der Zee, Julia Sealock, Sarah Elson, Sandra Sanchez Roige, Jessica Dennis, and Sarah Elson.

Eden’s project focused on calling genotypes for the X and Y chromosomes using GBS data. She was able to adapt the pipeline for use in the sex chromosomes but discovered that imputation was much less successful because the reference genotype data that we had been using for the autosomes is much less complete for the sex chromosomes. Future work will use high and low coverage whole genome sequence data to discover and call SNPs on the sex chromosomes.