Study title

Genetic Features of Delay Discounting in an HS Rat Model

Description

This application is responsive to PAR-15-120 (Identification of Genetic and Genomic Variants by Next-Gen Sequencing in Non-Human Animal Models). Substance use disorders are often characterized by heightened preference for small, immediate over larger, delayed rewards (“delay discounting”). Four aims are proposed to accomplish this objective. Aim 1 will phenotype 600 heterogeneous stock (HS) rats for delay discounting using the adjusting amount procedure (Richards et al. 1997; Wilhelm and Mitchell 2009). Aim 2 will use bi-directional short-term selective breeding on a subset of these HS rats to form high (HD) and low (LD) delay discounting selected lines. Rats from the 4th generation of selection will be used to identify changes in allele frequency due to selection by genotyping the LD and HD selected lines. Aim 3 will sequence the brain transcriptome in 200 phenotyped HS rats to characterize the gene expression signatures for delay discounting in the brain regions. The sufficiency of these signatures to predict selection targets will be evaluated by analyzing the transcriptomes (RNA-Seq) from HD and LD selected lines at the 4th generation of selection collected under Aim 2. Aim 4 will examine HD and LD rats’ performance on other measures of impulsivity, including performance on a within sessions measure of delay discounting, the stop signal task and the 5-choice serial reaction time task.

Funding sources

U01DA046077

Keywords

RNA-Seq

Delay Discounting

impulsivity

5-choice serial reaction time task

Methods for genotype

Low-coverage WGS based on Riptide library preparation (pulication in progress)

Methods for Phenotypes

Delay DiscountingDelay discounting using the adjusting amount procedure (Richards et al. 1997; Wilhelm and Mitchell 2009).

Methods for Omics