Poster 24
Presenter: Abraham Palmer
Thursday, 4:00 – 6:00pm
Clarissa C. Parker, Shelly B. Flagel, Terry E. Robinson,Abraham A. Palmer Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA; Department of Psychology (Biopsychology Program), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Much of our daily behavior is controlled by stimuli (cues) associated with rewards; these cues can promote either adaptive or maladaptive behavior. Cues associated with rewards (conditional stimuli, CSs) powerfully motivate behavior only if they are attributed with incentive motivational properties ( incentive salience ), and thus acquire the ability to act as incentive stimuli. Among outbred Sprague Dawley rats there is large variation in the propensity of individual rats to attribute incentive salience to food and drug cues. Using a behavioral paradigm called Pavlovian Conditioned Approach (PCA), Sprague Dawley rats can be assigned a quantitative score indicating their tendency to behave as sign trackers, meaning that they assign incentive salience to the cue (sign) or goal trackers, which do not assign incentive salience to the cue. As part of an ongoing program project grant we (Flagel, Robinson) are already phenotyping several thousand Sprague Dawley rats. We (Parker, Palmer) are now in the process of genotyping DNA from these rats using a genotype by sequencing approach. We will use the resulting data to perform a genome-wide association study. This will allow us to identify genes that underlie the individual variability in PCA observed among outbred Sprague Dawley rats. This project has the potential to open up completely new molecular avenues for exploring the role of cues in shaping behavior. The sample size is larger than any similar mouse or rat study that we are aware of and thus provides outstanding power.