The article, “Polygenic transcriptome risk scores (PTRS) can improve portability of polygenic risk scores across ancestries”, has recently been accepted for publication in Genome Biology. This study explores the use of polygenic transcriptome risk scores (PTRS) to improve the prediction of transcriptomic data in underrepresented populations. Dr. Abraham Palmer and several others coauthored this article. See the article here. Congratulations, Dr. Palmer!

The article, “Genes identified in rodent studies of alcohol intake are enriched for heritability of human substance use”, has been accepted for publication in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. This article discusses the use of GeneWeaver to enrich rodent alcohol & nicotine gene-sets for heritability of substance use traits in humans. Dr. Abraham Palmer and several others coauthored this article. See article here. Congratulations!

The 7th Annual Retreat for the NIDA Center for GWAS in Outbred Rats was held on 11/4/2021. 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. A closed advisory board meeting was held the following day.

Master’s Student Elizabeth Alcantara was recently awarded the BrightSpinnaker Fellowship. This fellowship is awarded to students who demonstrate a commitment to community service and provides funding for the master’s program at UCSD.

Congratulations, Liz!

The article, “Analysis of independent cohorts of outbred CFW mice reveals novel loci for behavioral and physiological traits and identifies factors determining reproducibility“, has been accepted for publication in G3. This study identifies the factors that impact reproducibility of GWAS studies in mice and demonstrates methods to obtain robust results from mapping complex traits in GWAS studies.

Congrats!

Elizabeth Alcantara joined the Palmer Lab in December of 2020 as an undergraduate volunteer and recently graduated from UCSD with a B.S in Neurobiology. She has recently been admitted to the UCSD BS/MS program and is now a Graduate Student Researcher in the lab. She will be focusing her work on investigating the relationship between Glo1 and drug addiction. In her free time, she enjoys eating out and trying new foods, reading, binge watching shows, and playing with her two cats.

Welcome, Liz!

Han Chen Joined the Palmer lab in September of 2021, he recently graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a B.S in Bioinformatics. His hobbies are playing tennis, cooking, and drawing.

Welcome, Han!

The manuscript , “Genome-wide association study of problematic opioid prescription use in 132,113 23andMe research participants of European ancestry”, has been provisionally accepted for publication in Molecular Psychiatry. Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige is the first author and Dr. Abraham Palmer is the last author; they are also co-corresponding authors. In addition, Mariela Jennings, Sevim Bianchi, and Yuye Huang, who are members of Dr. Sanchez-Roige’s lab, are co-authors. This study identified two genome wide significant loci associated with problematic opioid use (POU). Additional genetic correlations along with POU were found including alcohol dependence,

The 2021 Complex Trait Consortium (CTC) meeting was held virtually from Manchester, UK from September 1-3, 2021.

Abraham Palmer, Oksana Polesskaya,  Daniel Munro, Brittany Leger, Milad Mortazavi, Apurva Chitre, Joel Leal-Gutierrez, and Denghui Chen has attended.

Dr. Abraham Palmer has received a $200,000  supplement for the project titled, “Making data from the center for GWAS in out bred rats FAIR and AI/ML ready”.  NIDA has provided these funds to improve the AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning)-readiness of data from the Center for GWAS outbred rats. Additionally, these funds will be used to address important shortcomings in the processing of several large datasets and be used to implement new methods of effective information sharing.