The first of many annual retreats for the NIDA National Center of Excellence for Genome-wide Association Studies in Outbred Rats (P50DA037844) was held on September 17th! Collaborators from across the nation gathered on the University of Chicago campus to meet one another, discuss the goals of the center, and brainstorm for upcoming projects.

The NIDA National Center of Excellence was founded in 2014 to utilize cutting-edge genetic methods to elucidate the genetics of drug abuse-related behaviors in rats. The P50 grant is titled “Integrated GWAS of complex behavioral and gene expression

Dr. Jianjun Gao has joined the lab! He will be an instrumental part of the P50 grant, where he will use his impressive background in biostatistics to develop novel and efficient methods of analyzing complex genotype and behavioral phenotype data. Dr. Gao obtained his PhD from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences – Chinese Academy of Sciences, was an Assistant Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He brings over a decade of computational experience to the project

Laura’s project titled “From Statistical to Biological Epistasis in Mental Illness: Gene Expression as a Bridge” was selected by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

The NARSAD Young Investigator Grant provides support for the most promising young scientists conducting neurobiological research. Two year awards up to $60,000, or $30,000 per year are provided to enable promising investigators to either extend research fellowship training or begin careers as independent research faculty. For more information, please see their website.

Congratulations, Laura!

Dr. Abraham Palmer’s NIDA R01 Supplement titled, “Administrative Supplement for Research on Sex/Gender Differences,” was funded!

The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) offers administrative supplements to accelerate research on sex/gender differences (or similarities) and/or sex and gender factors in human health and illness, including preclinical, clinical and behavioral studies.

We plan to map sex-specific QTLs and brain eQTLs. The main traits of interest are methamphetamine-conditioned place preference and the locomotor response to methamphetamine, but we’ll also look at sex effects in the prepulse inhibition, glucose and body weight data.

The article, “High-resolution genetic mapping of complex traits in a combined analysis of an F2 intercross and an advanced intercross,” has been accepted for publication in Genetics.

Authors include Clarissa Parker, Peter Carbonetto, Greta Sokoloff, Jenny Park, Mark Abney and Abraham Palmer.

Kat McMurray’s scientific abstract, “GLO1 inhibition as a novel fast-acting antidepressant,” has been accepted for presentation in a nanosymposium at Neuroscience 2014.

Neuroscience 2014 will be held on Nov 15-19, 2014 in Washington, DC.

Dr. Peter Carbonetto accepts a position at www.Ancestory.com

Dr. Carbonetto spent a year in the Palmer lab during which time he contributed to several projects that are only now being published.

The article, “Discovery and refinement of muscle weight QTLs in B6 x D2 advanced intercross mice,” has been accepted for publication in Physiological Genomics.  Co-authors include Joseph Gyekis, David Blizard, Arimantas Lionikas, Peter Carbonetto, Riyan Cheng, Clarissa Parker, and Abraham Palmer.

The grant is titled “Integrated GWAS of complex behavioral and gene expression traits in outbred rats” and involved collaborators from University of Michigan (Terry Robbinson and Shelly Flagel, SUNY Buffalo (Jerry Richards, Paul Meyer and Joe Lucke), University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center (Hao Chen) and Medical College of Wisconsin (Leah Solberg Woods).

The article, “Phenotypic instability between the near isogenic substrains BALB/cJ and BALB/cByJ” was accepted for publication in Mammalian Genome.

The authors include Laura J. Sittig, Choongwon Jeong, Emily Tixier, Joe Davis, Camila M. Barrios Camacho, and Abraham A. Palmer.