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!
The grant titled, “Integrative Omics Center for Accelerating Neurobiological Understanding of Opioid Addiction”, has been awarded to Drs. Eric Otto Johnson, Abraham Palmer and several others. The goal of the Integrative Omics Center for Accelerating Neurobiological Understanding of Opioid Addiction (ICAN) is to identify the genetic basis for opioid addiction. Dr. Palmer is an MPI for project 3, which seeks to integrate rodent and human studies using statistical genetic approaches and rodent experiments.
Congratulations!
The manuscript, “Clinical, Environmental, and Genetic Risk Factors for Substance Use Disorders: Characterizing Combined Effects across Multiple Cohorts”, has been provisionally accepted for publication in Molecular Psychiatry. This article investigates the ability to identify individuals at higher risk for substance use disorders across four cohorts using models that include clinical/environmental risk index (CERI) and polygenic scores (PGS). Dr. Abraham Palmer is a co-author along with several others. See preprint here!
Haoyu Jia joined the Palmer lab in August 2022 as an information system analyst. He received a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego with a specialization in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Controls. His research interests involve applications of machine learning and data science in medical data, particularly with genomics and microbiomics. In his free time Haoyu enjoys video games, motorsports, and cosplay.
Welcome, Haoyu!
Heng Xu began his rotation in the Palmer Lab in August 2022 as a student for the BISB program. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a M.A. in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science. In his spare time, he enjoys rock climbing, biking, and spending time with his two cats.
Welcome, Heng!
