Symposium on Data Integration from the Monkey Model of Alcohol Drinking

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary goal of the conference is to customize an informatic platform to produce new knowledge in the long-term adaptation of multiple organ systems to chronic, excessive, voluntary alcohol self-administration in order to understand the dynamic contributions of these adaptations to adverse biomedical outcomes. We will accomplish this goal by bringing together scientists that have collaborated and used the resources within the Monkey Alcohol Tissue Research Resource (www.MATRR.com) and the Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism (INIA): Stress, anxiety and excessive alcohol (www.INIAstress.org). The data sets that have been generated on the tissue to date are cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional, but all have the common factor of the same alcohol self-administration procedure, same antecedent and subsequent longitudinal genomic, endocrine, imaging and behavioral protocols. Indeed, the monkey model of alcohol self-administration has produced novel data for hypothesis testing relating the risk for and consequences of alcohol consumption and serve to bi-directionally bridge the gap between rodent and human studies. The symposium will focus on datasets generated from two species of monkeys (cynomolgus and rhesus macaques), particularly the rapid expansion of the data from different disciplines in the past 3 years. An outcome of the meeting will be to further understand from the users how to develop an informatics system that can accept summarized experimental outcomes across many disciplines and experimental protocols in order to integrate the analysis of genomic, genetic and phenotypic information and produce a comprehensive picture of dynamic interactions of risk factors, alcohol exposure, and adverse biomedical outcome. The gathering of geneticists, molecular biologists, neurophysiologists, endocrinologists, immunologists, osteopathologists, in vivo imagers, and behaviorists for a two day meeting will efficiently accomplish this goal.