Our research is focused on two broad areas of post-genome science: the systems biology of behavior and biomarker development. To examine the neurobiological basis of cognitive decline with aging, stimulant abuse, and alcoholism we combine behavioral models with functional genomic and proteomic technologies. Over the past two years we have identified that specific proteomic changes occur in the hippocampus with cognitive decline that are not evident in healthy aging, and that even long after cessation of cocaine self-administration altered gene expression and epigenetic changes persist in the cortex.

The ultimate goal of behavioral research is to better understand the neurobiological basis of behavior and provide novel targets for prevention and therapies. In biomarker development our objective is to provide tools to enable more efficient drug development and new diagnostic tools.

qPCR data from a 24 gene biomarker panel was used to test the ability of the biomarker panel to classify de-identified samples correctly as control, diabetic or ischemia-reperfusion. This classification was performed for the 3 month diabetes and 48 hour post ischemia reperfusion time points as these time points both demonstrated increased caspase-3 activity and vascular permeability. A support vector machine algorithm (SVM) was used with the training set composed of data from one animal set. Seven independent animal sets composed the test set. The biomarker panel performed with 96% accuracy in the 84 samples tested.