Overall NIDA Core "Center of Excellence" in Transcriptomics, Systems Genetics and the Addictome

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Addiction is a highly complex disease with risk factors that include genetic variants and differences in development, sex, and environment. The long term potential of precision medicine to improve drug treatment and prevention depends on gaining a much better understanding how genetics, drugs, brain cells, and neuronal circuitry interact to influence behavior. There are serious technical barriers that prevent researchers and clinicians from incorporating more powerful computational and predictive methods in addiction research. The purpose of the NIDA P30 Core Center of Excellence in Omics, Systems Genetics, and the Addictome is to empower and train researchers supported by NIH, NIDA, NIAAA, and other federal and state institutions to use more quantitative and testable ways to analyze genetic, epigenetic, and the environmental factors that influence drug abuse risk and treatment. In the Transcriptome Informatics and Mechanisms research core we assemble and upgrade hundreds of large genome (DNA) and transcriptome (RNA) datasets for experimental rodent (rat) models of addiction. In the Systems Analytics and Modeling research core, we are using innovative systems genetics methods (gene mapping) to understand the linkage between DNA differences, environmental risks such as stress, and the differential risk of drug abuse and relapse. Our Pilot core is catalyzing new collaborations among young investigator in the field of addiction research. In sum the Center is a national resource for more reproducible research in addiction. We are centralizing, archiving, distributing, analyzing and integrating high quality data, metadata, using open software systems in collaboration with many other teams of researchers. Our goal is to help build toward an NIDA Addictome Portal that will include all genomic research relevant to addiction research.