2007 — 2009 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
U01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Ontological Discovery For Ethanol Research @ Ut-Battelle, Llc-Oak Ridge National Lab
[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A major challenge for collaborative research on the neurobiology of alcoholism is the need to bring together data across all levels of biological scale from multiple strains and species to address questions about relations among biological processes and behaviors. Deep analytic integration is possible for planned experiments, reference populations and reference protocols. However, in a large and diverse consortium and extending to the biological research community, such integration is typically unobtainable. Knowledge synthesis and qualitative shifts in approach to the nerubiology of alcoholism requires highly interdisciplinary individuals who have mastered multiple literatures. This challenge can be addressed through application of recent developments in bioinformatics and advances in graph algorithms for global analysis of empirically defined gene-to- phenotype relations. We will create an archive of gene-to-phenotype relations, and use graph algorithms to discover the naturally occurring sets, subsets and supersets of phenotypes and genes. This scale, scope and complexity of this problem will be tackled by exploiting advances in high-performance supercomputing, database design and graph algorithms. This purely empirical approach to the development of gene and phenotype ontologies is designed to extract emergent new knowledge from the wealth of genome-phenome association data, in addition to describing what is known. The archive will be initially populated using our existing resources and from new project data collected by members of the Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism Consortium (INIA). Cross-species integration will be achieved through the use of gene homology. We will also develop an open-source, open-access Web based "Ontological Discovery System" for access to the data archive, analytic method and results by members of the INIA consortium and the alcohol research community at large. Using this tool, investigators will be able to start a query with sets of genes or phenotypes of interest and interactively explore their relations to other entities in the data archive to discover highly similar biological categories and to organize knowledge about the many facets of alcohol related phenotypes and their relation to the broader context of neural pathways and systems. This development work will occur in the context of a team of expert colleagues who will be capable of testing software, sharing data, performing biological interpretation and validating results of our analyses. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]
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0.966 |
2010 — 2019 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Data Structures, Algorithms and Tools For Ontological Discovery
? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our overarching goal is to discover the shared genomic mechanisms underlying alcoholism, addiction, neurobehavioral processes and the relations among these disorders. To do so we have developed a knowledge discovery environment, GeneWeaver.org, which enables users to store and integrate functional genomics data across species and experiment type. We curate data into this system around the behavioral neurosciences with a specific emphasis on alcoholism and addiction studies. Many other data sets are obtained from user submissions and major public resources. These data can be queried through a variety of means based on gene content and study description. User defined query results and user input data are harmonized and integrated through a suite of novel graph algorithms and tools to find genes highly associated to sets of biological processes and to find relations among aspects of alcoholism, addiction and related disorders. These relations are discovered primarily from empirical data via large-scale experimentation. We apply the system to questions in alcoholism and addiction research and perform validation studies on those findings which have sufficient novelty, feasibility and interest. In our renewal period, we will extend our work in several important ways. First, we will expand the breadth of biomolecular entities that the system supports, both by organism and molecular type, to capture the scope of functional genomics with greater precision and depth. Second, we will go beyond the comparison of the many sets of biomolecules that result from functional genomics studies to the comparison of relations among these entities, i.e., we will transition from set comparison to network comparison. Third, we will more explicitly apply the system to the biological comparison of behavioral disorders and the assessment of the conceptual integrity of terms such as anxiety and alcoholism or hyperactivity and addiction and to identify those biological entities that underlie core features of the overlap among these neurobehavioral conditions.
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0.957 |
2010 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
R13Activity Code Description: To support recipient sponsored and directed international, national or regional meetings, conferences and workshops. |
Genetics of Drug Addiction
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The short course on the Genetics of Addiction proposed in this application will provide students with an opportunity to learn about genetic applications and approaches to drug addiction research through methodological instruction making use of examples, literature and data sets drawn from studies of addiction related phenotypes, plenary sessions on major progress in addiction genetics, and discussion sessions in which students each present their work for group discussion on applications of genetic methods. Students will leave the course able to design and interpret genetic and genomic studies of addiction as they relate to their specific research question, and will be able to make use of current bioinformatics resources to identify research resources and make use of public data sources in their own research. These aims will be accomplished by an intensive 4-day course to be offered on August 14-18, 2010 at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Students will be chosen for their outstanding research potential in fields relevant to the course and will interact with a group of prominent computational biologists, bio-informaticists, biologists and geneticists both from The Jackson Laboratory and other institutions. Didactic sessions will be held in the mornings, while the afternoon and evening sessions will be reserved for hands-on training workshops and special lectures. Student enrollment is kept deliberately small (35) to achieve a desirable level of student-faculty interaction. Food and lodging will be provided at the Highseas Conference Center overlooking Frenchman Bay, providing an atmosphere highly conducive to interactions between students and faculty. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Evidence from human genetic analyses and from animal models suggests that vulnerability to addiction has a moderate to high heritable component. This course proposes to offer training in how to leverage genetic and genomic resources to understand these components and their role in human addiction.
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0.957 |
2011 — 2015 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Project E
Project E: Data Driven Systems Genetics Workflow for New Experimental Platforms; Elissa J. Chesler, Matthew A. Hibbs (Jackson) Systems genetics experiments typically involve separate acquisition of genotype, gene expression and phenotypic data in a genetically diverse population (Fig. 7 left). Conventional QTL and co-expression methods are applied to these data to construct genotype and phenotype networks. Application of this approach is reliant on existing resources, including a well-established reference genome, a dense genetic marker map often derived relative to the reference genome, and microarrays that are biased toward specific transcript structures and alleles. We will develop an approach that avoids these intrinsic biases through the development and application of high throughput RNA sequencing technology (HTPS) as the sole source of transcription and polymorphism data for an expression QTL experiment (Fig. 7 right). These new methods will minimize initial knowledge requirements. We will create software for our data-driven systems genetics approach, called SEQQTL, for use with highly diverse mouse populations, newly sequenced organisms, or in populations without an established genetic map. We will develop and validate these techniques in the DO mouse population.
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0.957 |
2011 — 2016 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
R13Activity Code Description: To support recipient sponsored and directed international, national or regional meetings, conferences and workshops. |
Workshop On the Genetics of Addiction
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The annual Short Course on the Genetics of Addiction proposed in this application will provide students with an opportunity to learn about genetic applications and approaches to drug addiction research. The methodological instruction includes examples, literature and data sets drawn from studies of addiction-related phenotypes, plenary sessions on major progress in addiction genetics, and discussion sessions in which students each present their work on applications of genetic methods, and discuss general questions provoked by the lectures. Students will leave the course able to design and interpret genetic and genomic studies of addiction as they relate to their specific research question, and to utilize current online data resources to support their research. These aims will be accomplished annually over the next three years through an intensive four-day course to be offered in late summer at the Jackson Laboratory (JAX) in Bar Harbor, Maine. In 2014, the course will be held August 29 through September 1, with arrivals and a reception on August 28 and departures on September 2. Participants will be chosen for their outstanding research potential in fields relevant to the course and will have the opportunity to interact with a group o prominent computational biologists, bioinformaticists, biologists, and geneticists from JAX and other institutions. A combination of didactic sessions and hands-on training will be offered during the day and informal discussions will be held in the evening. Student enrollment is kept deliberately small (35) to achieve a desirable level of student-faculty interaction. Food and lodging will be provided at the JAX-owned Highseas Conference Center, which creates an atmosphere highly conducive to interactions between students and faculty. A major emphasis will be placed on attracting promising young investigators to participate in this course and to actively promote the inclusion of women and under- represented minorities in an effort to promote diversity in the professoriate.
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0.957 |
2015 — 2021 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Discovery of Addiction-Related Genes With Advanced Mouse Resources
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Our overarching goal is to discover the genetic and genomic mechanisms underlying behavioral predisposition and development of addiction. Addiction remains a substantial worldwide social and economic burden despite extensive efforts to curb drug availability and use. The high heritability of cocaine addiction, indicates that the propensity to develop a substance use disorder (SUD) after drug exposure is genetically influenced. Both human and animal studies indicate that behavioral traits such as novelty seeking are strongly correlated with the propensity to develop an SUD, but the biological basis of this relationship is unknown. We identify and characterize biological mechanisms of addiction and predisposing behavior by harnessing advances in mouse genetic resources, including the high-precision Diversity Outbred (DO) mouse population, validation in genetically modified mice, gene expression quantitation through RNA sequence analysis, and computational and statistical methods in systems genetics. In Aim 1 we will identify genetic mechanisms underlying predisposing novelty-related traits and drug self-administration through quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis in a large set of DO mice. The most compelling and tractable of these will be validated in gene targeted mouse models. The intravenous drug-self administration (IVSA) paradigm, considered the gold standard for the assessment of addiction traits in rodent research, will enable quantification of the core features of addiction including initiation of drug use, poor extinction and enhanced reinstatement of reinforced drug taking. In Aim 2 we will quantify gene expression genetic variation in two connected addiction relevant tissues, the prefrontal cortex and striatum, map expression QTLs and identify genetic correlates of predisposing behavior using RNA- seq in a drug-naïve subset of DO mice, and disseminate these results through widely used informatics resources. Gene expression analysis in drug-naïve mice enables separation of the biological substrates of predisposition to addiction from the biological sequelae of drug exposure. In Aim 3, we will address the fundamental problem of evaluating coordinated gene expression across multiple components of the addiction circuitry to assess relative dysregulation toward the identification of global- vs brain region-specific factors in addiction vulnerability. This will be accomplished through the development of robust multivariate statistical methods for identification of relations across multiple high dimensional data sets. This strategy will make continued use of a common collection of phenotypes to relate disparate and incompatible measures across two independent sets of mice, while extending into multiple tissue co-expression networks. Development of this technique in the context of addiction research will extend a unifying data integration framework to multidimensional to human and mouse genetic and genomic studies for all disease areas. Synergy among the aims will reveal networks from polymorphism to addiction-related behavior.
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0.957 |
2016 — 2020 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Administrative Core
PROJECT SUMMARY ADMINISTRATIVE CORE The Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction (CSNA) is a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary team aligned toward the discovery of the biological mechanisms by which predisposing bio-behavioral risks influence psychostimulant abuse. The Administrative Core, led by the CSNA Director, supports the management of this geographically distributed collaboration and ensures budgetary oversight, timely progress, active and engaged communication across project participants, strategic decision-making with an elite external advisory board and internal advisory board, coordination of the pilot program review process, and organization of local and off-site center meetings. The Administrative Core also provides oversight of the education and outreach activities that disseminate the methods, resources and outcomes of this work to the broader research, clinical and general public communities. Because the Administrative Core is tasked with overcoming the challenges inherent to a large-scale distance collaboration, it will support a unique and innovative project structure that centers on a visitors program in which postdocs visit from each project's home institution. A highly qualified program manager will coordinate the center activities and will be chosen based on the administrative and scientific skills necessary to organize effective communication and facilitation of the day-to-day operations of the center. The work of the Administrative Core will be critical to the center's overall impact with efficient and effective management of people, processes and resources necessary to achieve its scientific goals.
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0.957 |
2016 — 2020 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Center For Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction
PROJECT SUMMARY OVERALL COMPONENT The Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction (CSNA) synergizes the expertise and effort of behavioral neuroscientists, computational biologists and geneticists, who each bring state-of-the-art approaches to an integrated research program that will identify and model the common underlying biological mechanisms of biobehavioral risks for stimulant self-administration. Drug addiction is a devastating and highly complex neurobehavioral phenomenon, characterized by multiple etiological factors, stages and behaviors that have proven difficult to study in combination. Advanced mouse genetic populations provide a platform for evaluating the relationships among these behaviors, finding genetic variants responsible for their variation and identifying their associated biological mechanisms and pathways. We will make use of the new Collaborative Cross genetic reference population and Diversity Outbred mapping population to identify the biological mechanisms by which predisposing traits predict the tendency to self-administer the psychostimulant drug cocaine. Each predisposing trait, including impulsivity, acute and sensitized drug responses, reward-seeking, adolescent nicotine exposure and circadian variation, is studied in one of the Center's five scientific projects. Our approach is unprecedented in that we will evaluate these traits simultaneously in a mouse population exhibiting extreme genetic and phenotypic variation, enabling a holistic and extensible assessment of the common and distinct biological mechanisms of addiction vulnerability. We will definitively and directly identify sources of trait correlation in the population. We will produce functional genomics and phenomics datasets, which will be deposited in widely accessed and highly functional informatics resources, where they may be expanded upon by the global research community. Our Center will also generate novel, validated mouse mutants and complex models for mechanistic studies of addiction-related phenomena. In addition to aiding the scientific mission of our five scientific projects, our three research support cores will provide proven, state-of-the-art and innovative technologies to the broader field, including: 1) a sophisticated, large-capacity Behavioral Phenotyping Core, 2) an Integrative Genetics and Genomics Core for statistical genetics, molecular profiling, biobanking and data dissemination, and 3) a Mouse Resource and Validation Core for delivering novel mouse resources for systems genetics, in vitro and in vivo mutation induction and validation. The Administrative Core will oversee the effective coordination, integration and dissemination of the Center's research activities and deliver our findings through The Jackson Laboratory (JAX)'s well-established educational programs. The Pilot Core will offer additional investigators the opportunity to initiate collaborative work with the Center. Through its combined efforts, the CSNA will enable discovery of the mechanisms linking multiple susceptibility phenotypes to the propensity to seek and take drugs, opening up new opportunities for both prevention in those at risk for addiction and intervention in those already afflicted.
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0.957 |
2016 — 2020 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Pilot Project Core
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT PILOT PROJECT CORE The Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction (CSNA) will offer pilot project opportunities to support the development of future CSNA-affiliated projects. Pilot projects will create critical opportunities for new investigators to generate key preliminary data for future systems genetic studies of addiction and will enable established investigators to test new hypotheses and migrate their research into the use of novel mouse genetic platforms for the assessment of biobehavioral addiction risk. In the initial phase of the program, we have selected three pilot projects. The first uses the phenomenal genetic diversity in the CC/DO inbred founders to test for modifiers of a new cocaine sensitization quantitative trait gene recently discovered by QTL analysis in closely related mouse strains, Cyfip2, and makes use of the CSNA Behavioral Phenotyping Core to extrapolate the effects of this polymorphism from cocaine sensitization to behavior in drug self-administration paradigms. The second pilot project comes from an established human geneticist. This is a translational genetics project, aimed to model and characterized methamphetamine use-related variants discovered in human genetic studies of addiction. Candidate variants will be engineered into the laboratory mouse using BAC transgenic strategies. These induced variants will be evaluated through a series of behavioral and molecular experiments. A third pilot project will enable integration of the CSNA's transcriptomic and genetic findings with epigenetic analysis by evaluating open chromatin in cocaine treated and control mice from the CC/DO founder strains. Future pilot projects will be selected from an open solicitation to the addiction research community and will be selected by the Internal Advisory Board in consultation with the External Advisory Board through a process coordinated by the Administrative Core. Criteria for the projects include overall impact, innovation, investigator, approach and feasibility within the CSNA, significance and relevance to the center, and likelihood to develop into center-affiliated, funded projects.
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0.957 |
2016 — 2020 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Project 4: Cocaine Ivsa
PROJECT SUMMARY PROJECT 4 ? COCAINE IVSA Evidence from both human and animal studies indicates that a multitude of traits, including novelty seeking, novelty preference, disruptions in circadian rhythms, prior drug exposure, and impulsivity are strongly correlated with the propensity to develop a substance use disorder, suggesting that in many cases, a common biological mechanism for these predictive phenomena and drug self-administration. We propose to identify biological mechanisms of addiction and predisposing behavior by harnessing recent advances in mouse genetic resources including the genetically diverse Collaborative Cross (CC) reference panel, the high- precision Diversity Outbred (DO) mouse population, and the computational and statistical methods in systems genetics developed to analyze these populations. Project 4 provides critical data for the correlation of multiple risk factors for vulnerability to cocaine self-administration. We will utilize male and female mice from the inbred CC and founder strains to quantify heritability and genetic correlations among predisposing novelty-related behaviors and intravenous cocaine self-administration, as well as their relationship with other heritable addiction-related behaviors assessed in the Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction (CSNA), which include impulsivity, nicotine conditioned place preference (CPP), circadian rhythms, and cocaine sensitization. Intravenous drug-self administration (IVSA), considered the gold standard for the assessment of addiction in preclinical research, will enable quantification of the core features of addiction including compulsive drug use, difficulty limiting drug intake and an extremely high motivation to take the drug. We will evaluate genetic correlations among behavioral phenotypes (novelty-related traits, cocaine IVSA) and the expression of genes and gene networks in CC mice. Gene co-expression networks, QTL positional candidates and behavioral correlates of gene expression will be compared with other functional genomics data to refine and characterize candidate genes and biological mechanisms. Behaviorally relevant expression mechanisms will be genetically mapped in DO mice to independently identify putative candidate genes for novelty-related traits and cocaine IVSA that act through transcriptional regulation of other relevant genes. We will use a large population of DO mice to map behavioral QTLs?and identify candidate genes?that influence cocaine IVSA and predisposing novelty-related behaviors. The most compelling and tractable of these candidate genes and mechanisms will be validated in mutant mice.
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0.957 |
2017 — 2019 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
R13Activity Code Description: To support recipient sponsored and directed international, national or regional meetings, conferences and workshops. |
Short Course On Genetics of Addiction
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The annual Short Course on the Genetics of Addiction proposed in this application will provide students with an opportunity to learn about genetic applications and approaches to drug addiction research. The methodological instruction includes examples, literature and data sets drawn from studies of addiction-related phenotypes, plenary sessions on major progress in addiction genetics, and discussion sessions in which students each present their work on applications of genetic methods, and discuss general questions provoked by the lectures. Students will leave the course able to design and interpret genetic and genomic studies of addiction as they relate to their specific research question, to locate the opportunities and resources for extrapolation between human genetics and model organisms, and to utilize current online data resources to support their research. These aims will be accomplished annually over the next three years through an intensive five-day course to be offered in late summer at the Jackson Laboratory (JAX) in Bar Harbor, Maine. In 2017, the course will be held September 11-15, with arrivals and a reception on September 10 and departures on September 16. Participants will be chosen for their outstanding research potential in fields relevant to the course and will have the opportunity to interact with a group of prominent computational biologists, bioinformaticists, biologists, and geneticists from JAX and other institutions. A combination of didactic sessions and hands-on training will be offered during the day and informal discussions will be held in the evening. Student enrollment is deliberately kept small (35) to achieve a desirable level of student-faculty interaction. Food and lodging will be provided at the JAX-owned Highseas Conference Center, which creates an atmosphere highly conducive to interactions between students and faculty. A major emphasis will be placed on attracting promising young investigators to participate in this course and to actively promote the inclusion of women and under-represented minorities in an effort to promote diversity in the professoriate. !
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0.957 |
2020 — 2021 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
U54Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These differ from program project in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes, with funding component staff helping to identify appropriate priority needs. |
Bioinformatics Section
PROJECT SUMMARY BIOINFORMATICS CORE The broad goal of the Bioinformatics Core is to support development of novel mouse models in The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) Center for Precision Genetics (JCPG) with portal that supports the activities of the Center with simplified access to tools, resources and expertise, and deploys data driven strategies that integrate genetic, genomic and phenotypic information across humans and mice. The development of disease models has been hampered by simplifying assumptions regarding disease variant identification, phenotype annotation and model development. Unfortunately, the early notion held by human and mouse geneticists that a defect in a single gene would equate to a single disease has proven wrong and it is now clear that human disease is much more complex. Progress depends on making animal models that reflect this complexity. The JCPG Bioinformatics Core will develop, implement, disseminate, apply and validate data-driven approaches to the refinement of mouse models through the computational integration of genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity. This work harnesses and integrates a suite of tools and data resources available at The Jackson Laboratory and beyond, including GeneWeaver, Mouse Phenome Database, Human Phenotype Ontology and Monarch Initiative, and multiple resources from the Mouse Genome Database and Alliance for Genome Resources. The practical goal of the Core is to establish the workflows, implement software enhancements and a publicly accessible portal that provide a seamless user experience for the identification, design and evaluation of mouse models appropriate for a given disease. To achieve this our work will pursue the following three Aims, each designed to develop specific tools or services: Aim 1. We will develop a suite of services for the analytic integration of human and mouse genetic, genomic and phenomic data to identify and prioritize features for enhanced precision disease models. Aim 2. We will provide an integrated study intake and management system with data quality control, analytics and dissemination tools that interoperates with our knowledge graph and catalogue. Aim 3. We will develop an external end-user facing portal for access to guided workflows, data and model and model organisms, project tracking and access to integrated resources.
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0.957 |
2020 — 2021 |
Chesler, Elissa J |
R13Activity Code Description: To support recipient sponsored and directed international, national or regional meetings, conferences and workshops. |
Short Course On the Genetics of Addiction
ABSTRACT The annual Short Course on the Genetics of Addiction proposed in this application builds on the successes of the previous iteration of this Course and will provide students with an opportunity to learn about genetic applications and approaches to drug addiction research in humans and model organisms. The methodological instruction includes examples, literature and data sets drawn from studies of addiction-related phenotypes, plenary sessions on major progress in addiction genetics, and discussion sessions in which students each present their work on applications of genetic methods, and discuss general questions provoked by the lectures. Students will leave the course able to design and interpret genetic and genomic studies of addiction as they relate to their specific research question, to locate the opportunities and resources for extrapolation between human genetics and model organisms, and to utilize current online data resources to support their research. These aims will be accomplished annually over the next five years through an intensive five-day course to be offered in late summer at the Jackson Laboratory (JAX) in Bar Harbor, Maine. In 2020, the course will be held September 20-26, with arrivals and a reception on September 20 and departures on September 26. Participants will be chosen for their outstanding research potential in fields relevant to the course and will have the opportunity to interact with a group of prominent computational biologists, bioinformaticists, biologists, and geneticists from JAX and other institutions. A combination of didactic sessions and hands-on training will be offered during the day and informal discussions will be held in the evening. Student enrollment is deliberately kept small (35) to achieve a desirable level of student-faculty interaction. Food and lodging will be provided at the JAX-owned Highseas Conference Center, which creates an atmosphere highly conducive to interactions between students and faculty. A major emphasis will be placed on attracting promising young investigators to participate in this course and to actively promote the inclusion of women and under-represented minorities in an effort to cultivate diversity in the professoriate.
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0.957 |
2021 |
Berwin, Brent L Chesler, Elissa J |
R25Activity Code Description: For support to develop and/or implement a program as it relates to a category in one or more of the areas of education, information, training, technical assistance, coordination, or evaluation. |
Growing the Genetics of Addiction Workforce With Urm Faculty-Student Research Experiences
PROJECT SUMMARY The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) will provide a unique research and training experience designed to encourage and assist members of groups that are under-represented in the biomedical and behavioral sciences to pursue or advance research or science-related careers in addiction-related areas. The long-term goal is to increase the diversity of next-generation scientists that can use cutting edge genetics and genomics techniques to study addiction. To achieve this goal, trainee recruitment efforts will target institutions serving significant underrepresented minority (URM) populations and faculty who themselves are URM. This training program consist of two components. To begin, participants will first complete a customized, virtual mentored course designed to deliver foundational skills and knowledge in mammalian and systems genetics of addiction. The virtual course will combine newly-derived content combined with material derived from several of JAX's signature courses including the McKusick Human and Mammalian Genetics Short Course, and the Short Course on the Genetics of Addiction, and from established JAX online educational modules including The Basics of Mouse Genetics, and Complex Traits. Then, a subset of course participants will be invited to return to JAX with 2 trainees (post-doctoral, graduate or undergraduate) for an extended summer research experience mentored by hosting JAX faculty. Faculty-trainee teams will be hosted at JAX by program mentors, where they will make use of JAXs advanced research resources to learn techniques needed to augment their research into addiction related phenomena through the incorporation of mammalian genetics and genomics. They will return to their home institutions with knowledge, skills, data and resources to support follow-on research, presentations, publications and grant applications. This model will foster the career development of URM faculty as well as both the participating young scientist-trainees and the future trainees of the URM faculty member. The program is designed to achieve the following Specific Aims: 1) Provide foundational education in mammalian genetics and systems genetics of addiction through virtual, mentored instruction. 2) Engage diverse faculty and student teams in summer mentored research projects utilizing advanced methods and resources for addiction genetics. 3) Recruit individuals from underrepresented minority groups to participate in the virtual course, mentored research experiences, and career development skills training. Impact: Successful completion of these aims will result in an expanded number of addiction researchers from URM groups who are actively working with model organism genetics and genomics to understand and characterize mechanisms of addiction related behavior. Educational materials will be made broadly available, and a select group of investigators will advance to develop specific genetic and genomic research programs with support in the use of emerging technologies in these fields. The effectiveness of this novel program will be evaluated and if successful, may be used as a model for expanded deployment in other research fields or institutions.
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0.957 |