Bipolar Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Bipolar, including details on bipolar disorder, symptoms, treatment, depression, medication.

Convergent Functional Genomics of bipolar disorder: From animal model pharmacogenomics to human genetics and biomarkers.

Le-Niculescu H, McFarland MJ, Mamidipalli S, Ogden CA, Kuczenski R, Kurian SM, Salomon DR, Tsuang MT, Nurnberger Jr JI, Niculescu AB

Laboratory of Neurophenomics, Department of Psychiatry,Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN 46202-2873, USA; INBRAIN, Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatric Research, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA.

Progress in understanding the genetic and neurobiological basis of bipolar disorder(s) has come from both human studies and animal model studies. Until recently, the lack of concerted integration between the two approaches has been hindering the pace of discovery, or more exactly, constituted a missed opportunity to accelerate our understanding of this complex and heterogeneous group of disorders. Our group has helped overcome this "lost in translation" barrier by developing an approach called convergent functional genomics (CFG). The approach integrates animal model gene expression data with human genetic linkage/association data, as well as human tissue (postmortem brain, blood) data. This Bayesian strategy for cross-validating findings extracts meaning from large datasets, and prioritizes candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for subsequent targeted, hypothesis-driven research. The CFG approach may also be particularly useful for identification of blood biomarkers of the illness.

Published 6 July 2007 in Neurosci Biobehav Rev.
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