Educational Sessions

Time : Friday, October 14, 2005
Place : Westin Copley Place, Boston
Cost : $48 (does not include attendee meals)
Note : This cost covers attendance at two sessions.

Registration Form (MS Word)      Registration Form (PDF)

Educational Session 1: Epigenetics.

9:30 - 11:30 a.m.
Organized and Chaired by Arturas Petronis
Presenters include Schahram Akbarian, Dennis Grayson, James Potash

Epigenetics represents a new development in psychiatric research. Psychiatric epigenetics puts the emphasis on aberrant modifications of DNA and chromosomal proteins as one of the key etiological mechanisms of major psychiatric disease. Both the inherited and acquired nature of epigenetic regulation of genes and genomes makes epigenetic misregulation an attractive candidate mechanism for explanation of various non-Mendelian features of complex psychiatric phenotypes, such as discordance of monozygotic twins, parental origin- and sex- effects, and peaks of incidence that follow major hormonal changes in the organism, among others. The key objective of this educational session is to discuss WHY epigenetics can be an important addition to the traditional DNA sequence-based research strategies. In addition, technological aspects of epigenetic studies will be discussed in order to explain HOW epigenetic hypotheses can be tested in the laboratory.

Educational Session 2: Family-Based Association Tests:
The FBAT and PBAT Approaches.
Basics of Family Based Association Tests and Design.

9:30 - 11:30 a.m.
Organized and Chaired by Nan Laird and Christoph Lange
Presenters include Jordan Smoller and Jessica Su

This session will briefly review the basics of family-based association tests and discuss their generalization to arbitrary phenotypes, arbitrary family configurations, multiple genetic models and multiple closely spaced markers (haplotypes).

Educational Session 3: Genetic Counseling

1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Organized and Chaired by Christine Finn
Presenters include Robert Green, Beth Rosen Sheidley, Holly Landrum Peay, and Jehannine Claire Austin

The field of psychiatric genetics is expanding rapidly, but clinical applications of genetic knowledge in psychiatry remain limited to two main areas: genetic counseling for psychiatric disorders and evaluation of psychiatric patients for the presence of an underlying genetic or metabolic syndrome. The evaluation for the presence of a genetic or metabolic syndrome will be reviewed, with several genetic and metabolic syndromes presented as examples of conditions with high rates of psychiatric symptomatology. Future applications of genetic knowledge in psychiatry will also be considered.

Educational Session 4: Family-Based Association Tests:
The FBAT and PBAT Approaches.
Techniques for Testing Large Numbers of Makers

1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Organized and Chaired by Nan Laird and Christoph Lang
Presenters include Jordan Smoller and Jessica Su

We will discuss FBATs for complex traits such as longitudinal data, multivariate data and time to onset of the disease. Testing strategies that bypass the multiple testing problem in genome-wide association studies will illustrated. Applications will be shown, using the FBAT and the PBAT program.