Minutes for the P30 Meeting for Nov 6, 2015

Host: Core C (Drs. Eric Xing and Wei Wu Group), Gates-Hillman Center, Room 2109

Invited Speaker:   Dr. Manojkumar Puthenveedu, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, CMU, presented a talk entitled, “Opioid receptor trafficking – roles in opioid physiology and addiction.” (2:05 – 3:35 pm)

            Key Discussion Points: Dr. Manojkumar Puthenveedu talked about a possible mechanism for opioid receptor that makes heroin, codeine, and morphine different from the endogenous ligands for opioid receptor. It is the dynamics of intracellular trafficking, the endocytosis of opioid receptor, which might be followed by the degradation or the recycle of the opioid receptor, making different effects among different drugs. Dr. Wei Wu suggested that Core C can work together with Dr. Puthenveedu for the analysis of gene expression data of cells treated with different abused drugs to explore their mechanisms further. Dr. Sean Xie and Dr. Lirong Wang suggested that Core A can work with Dr. Puthenveedu to refine GPCR dynamic model with the experimental data of mu-receptor from Dr. Puthenveedu. The GPCR dynamic model has been established by Yan Zhang in Core A.

Research Progress Update/Demonstration: Georg Schoenherr, a student in Dr. Xing’s Group, gave a demo and tutorial: “How to use the GenAMap software system.” GenAMap software is designed for analysis of the association between personalized Traits and SNPs. Traits are actually the characteristics like height, weight, the disease symptoms or blood pressure. Min Kyung Lee, Research Scientist at the Center for Machine Learning and Health@CMU, requested feedback for use of the software.

Other Points of Discussion: Dr. Xing raised a question about what kind of functions and points would make us want to use the software to analyze the relationship between genes and traits.

Next Meeting:

Host: Core A (Dr. Xiang-Qun Xie), UPitt

Date: Friday, Dec 4, 2015