The article, “Propensity for social interaction predicts nicotine reinforced behaviors in outbred rats” has been accepted for publication in Genes, Brain and Behavior.  Other co-authors include Tengfei Wang, Wenyan Han, Bin Wang, Qin Jiang, Leah Solberg Woods and Hao Chen.

Dr. Palmer presented his talk, “Behavioral Genetic Studies in Mice and Men” at North Carolina State University on Monday Nov 25.  He also spoke at UNC Chapel Hill and at the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics Seminar hosted by UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy on Tuesday Nov 26.

The article, “The circadian clock gene Csnk1e regulates REM sleep amount and NREM sleep architecture in mice” has been accepted for publication in SLEEP.  Other co-authors include Lili Zhou, Fred Turek, Martha Vitaterna and Andrew London.

The article “Genetic Variation for Life History Sensitivity to Seasonal Warming in Arabidopsis thaliana” has been accepted for publication in Genetics.  Other co-authors include Justin Borevitz, Riyan Cheng, Yan Li and Kurt Spokas.

The Epstein Trainee Award for excellence in human genetics research is awarded by the American Society of Human Genetics. It is a merit-based award that recognizes highly competitive abstracts submitted and presented at the ASHG Annual Meeting.  Congratulations, Shyam!

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The article, “Social neuroscience and its potential contribution to psychiatry” was published in World Psychiatry.  This review was co-authored by Drs. John and Stephanie Cacioppo and Dr. Stephanie Dulawa.

The Pilot and Feasibility award is titled “Mapping epistatic modifiers of diabetes using the Akita mouse model of pancreatic beta cell stress” and provides $35,000 to study epistatic interactions between the Akita mutation in the insulin protein and genetic modifiers. The award can be renewed for a second and final year.

More information about the DRTC can be found here: http://drtc.bsd.uchicago.edu/

Dr. Palmer’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant titled “Efficient discovery of epistatic modifiers of Cacna1c in mice: extending on GWAS”was funded today!

Alex Gileta, a second year human genetics graduate student, has decided to join the lab. His initial project will focus on a GWAS study of almost 3000 genetically heterogeneous rats, phenotyped for incentive salience at the University of Michigan by Shelly Flagel and Terry Robinson, and genotyped by reduced representation sequencing.

The article, Practical considerations regarding the use of genotype and pedigree data to model relatedness in the context of genome-wide association studies, has been accepted for publication in G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics.