Autism, depression, anxiety. Antipsychotic drug side effects. What are the genetic and environmental factors that underlie and contribute to these complex problems? And how do genes and environment interact to shape them?
To seek answers, the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Institute of Mental Health has named the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science and awarded UNC $8.6 million over five years to fund a new Center for Integrated Systems Genetics, or CISGen.
In funding the grant to UNC for the first two years, NIMH will contribute about $6 million through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The new center will require "an exceptional diversity of scientific expertise - from psychiatry to mouse genetics to computational biology," says CISGen co-director Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics at the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences. "UNC is one of the few places in the US where this sort of project is possible, and the Center of Excellence award recognizes this."
Pardo-Manuel de Villena says that the crux of the problem is that "the genome is enormous, and there are billions of ways in which the pieces can act together. It's easier to win the PowerBall lottery than to get the right answer in humans." The centerpiece of the UNC Center of Excellence is to use laboratory mice to screen all the possibilities to find the few that are likely. "We can use the mouse to narrow the search space from billions of possibilities to only hundreds or even dozens. It's like the PowerBall when you know four or five of the six numbers for sure."
The CISGen team, co-directed by Patrick Sullivan, M.D., Ray M. Hayworth and Family Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry in the department of genetics at the UNC School of Medicine, will integrate the study of genetics and neurobehavior using unique strains of laboratory mice derived from a mouse resource housed at UNC known as the Collaborative Cross. Sullivan also is a member of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, the Center under which CISGen will operate.