Poster 17
Presenter: Shyam Gopalakrishnan
Wednesday, 3:00 – 5:00pm
Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Natalia Gonzales, Clarissa C. Parker, Emmanuel Ayree and Abraham A. Palmer Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, IL 60637 and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago, IL 60637
Mice are one of the primary model organisms used to study behavior. We used gene expression in the mouse brain as an intermediate phenotype to better understand the mechanisms underlying behavioral traits. We sampled 80 animals from an extant outbred population (CFW). We dissected 3 brain regions: hippocampus, pre-frontal cortex and striatum and quantified the mRNA in each tissue using short read RNA sequencing (RNASeq). We used genotype-by-sequencing approach to genotype these mice at ~100,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms spread across the genome. We are performing an eQTL analysis in each tissue separately. We will use allele-specific expression differences to validate cis-eQTLs when possible. We will consolidate these results and compare the eQTLs across the tissues to identify genes that exhibit differential regulation between these regions and to increase power when regulatory differences are common to multiple tissues. We supplement this analysis by identifying genes that are differentially expressed in these 3 regions. We hope to characterize the expression landscape in these 3 brain regions, along with variants that affect them.