The article, “Genomic Basis of Delayed Reward Discounting,” has been accepted for publication in Behavioural Processes. Dr. Abraham Palmer and Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige are co-authors along with Joshua Gray, James MacKillop, and Harriet de Wit.

Highlights from the paper:
• Delayed reward discounting (DRD) is a measure of capacity to delay gratification.

• DRD is moderately heritable and associated with mental, physical, and social outcomes.

• DRD is a component of Research Domain Criteria and a putative target for treatment.

• The largest GWAS to date yielded a SNP heritability of 12% and one significant

Apurva Chitre gave a talk at the MEDINSPIRE, an international multidisciplinary medical conference  hosted on 14th – 17th February 2019 in Mumbai, India.
The talk title was “Genome wide association study of body weight, body mass index, adiposity, and fasting glucose in 3,173 outbred rats”. Apurva won the Best oral presentation Award in the Physiology category. Congratulations!

The article, “Multidimensional latent structure of risk-related phenotypes in healthy young adults,” has been accepted for publication in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. Dr. Palmer is a co-author along with Elisa Pabon, James MacKillop, and Harriet de Wit.

Dr. Palmer gave a talk entitled “Collaboration with 23andMe to study the genetic basis of impulsivity: implications for smoking” at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco (SRNT) on Feb 21, 2019, as part of a session titled “genetic basis of addiction and tobacco-related diseases.”

Dr. Palmer visited 23andMe on February 20, 2019, and gave a talk titled “Genetic approaches to understanding the biological basis of behavior”.

Dr. Palmer is a co-Investigator on the newly awarded R01 titled “Genetic Modulators of Glaucoma”. The PI is Dr. Monika Jablonski (Department of Ophthalmology in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center). The grant will be funded by the National Eye Institute to study glaucoma-related traits in HS rats. Dr. Jablonski has been collaborating with NIDA center on a GWAS in outbred rats led by Dr. Palmer. This grant will fund the phenotyping of eyes obtained from the NIDA center. Phenotypes obtained by Dr. Jablonski will

The article, “Electronic health records are the next frontier for the genetics of substance use disorders,” has been accepted for publication in Trends in Genetics. Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige and Dr. Abraham Palmer are co-authors.

Dr. Palmer has been interviewed by “Good Morning San Diego” about a new GWAS for risk tolerance.

“Being willing to take risks is essential to success in the modern world,” said study co-author Abraham Palmer, PhD, professor of psychiatry and vice chair for basic research at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “But we also know that taking too many risks, or not giving enough weight to the consequences of risky decisions, confers vulnerability to smoking, alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction.” The full interview can be found here.

The article, “Incentive salience attribution, ‘sensation-seeking’ and ‘novelty-seeking’ are independent traits in a large sample of male and female heterogeneous stock rats,” has been accepted for publication in Scientific Reports. Dr. Abraham Palmer is a co-author along with Alesa Hughson, Aidan Horvath, Katie Holl, Leah C. Solberg Woods, Terry Robinson, and Shelly Flagel.

Dr. Palmer gave a talk at IROC section (International Rat Omics Consortium).  The talk was focused on accomplishments of the  NIDA center for GWAS in outbred rats (P50DA037844, “Integrated GWAS of complex behavioral and gene expression traits in outbred rats”) over the past four and a half years. Dr. Palmer also presented a poster highlighting goals and results of the P50 Center.

Dr. Sanchez-Roige gave a talk titled “Alcohol consumption vs. misuse: evidence for distinct genetic architecture”.