Meeting/Event

Addiction, Microarrays, and Gene Discovery

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Embassy Suites Hotel at the Chevy Chase Pavilion, Washington, DC
Participant List (197.85 KB)
Agenda (159.1 KB)

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United States

Meeting Summary

NIDA Organizers:  John Satterlee, Ph.D. and Jonathan Pollock, Ph.D.

Meeting Purpose and Intent:

Microarray technology provides the unprecedented ability to interrogate the gene expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. This workshop is designed to bring researchers using this technology together to share their findings and to discuss obstacles and opportunities for using microarrays to identify genes involved in addiction.

Brief Discussion of Meeting Outcome:

Excellent presentations highlighted the cutting edge work going on in this area. Of particular interest was the complementary use of genetic and gene expression data to identify genes involved in neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as the translation of basic mouse research to human gene/phenotype discovery. During the discussions several recommendations were made. These included:

  1. supporting recombinant inbred mouse strain resources and the Collaborative Cross to facilitate the identification of mouse genes modulating complex behaviors,
  2. the development of brain dissection standards,
  3. improved human brain bank resources, particularly for allele specific gene expression,
  4. the need for new, higher throughput behavioral tests, particularly for wild-derived mouse strains,
  5. the importance of testing differences in behaviors in both sexes,
  6. improved statistical genetics tools and databases , and
  7. training of statistical geneticists for drug abuse research. 

Since many members of this group pioneered investigations into the relationships between genotype and gene expression phenotypes, there was also much discussion about analogous investigations into the relationships between genotype, gene expression phenotype, and epigenetic phenotypes as well as how one could use recombinant inbred strains to genetically map epigenetic phenomena.

Brief Description of Resulting Publications:

Dr. Robert Williams is working on a meeting review article for potential publication in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.