Name Simone de Jong
Departement Medical Genetics (Complex Genetics)
Section Neurodevelopment
Function PhD student
E-mail:
s.dejong-6@umcutrecht.nl
Telephone number: + 31 (0)88 756 8790
Supervisor Dr. R.A. Ophoff
Title research Gene expression studies of neuropsychiatric traits in human and mouse
Summary research Complex neuropsychiatric disorders are often debilitating and their course is unpredictable. Consequently, they have a big impact on both the quality of life of the patient and their social and economic environment. Treatment of these disorders is aimed at managing symptoms, while the underlying pathology remains unknown. Medication is often inefficient and induces severe side effects. These factors make that disorders like depression and schizophrenia are considered to be chronic.
My PhD project is aimed at unraveling the underlying genetic pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders, by making use of gene expression data in both human and mouse. The main focus is schizophrenia and expression data from schizophrenic patients and healthy controls are available to further investigate the pathology of this disorder. The mouse data involves looking at differences in selected brain areas between different inbred strains to try to explain their markedly different behavior. In addition, comparing expression data of mouse and man can reveal similarities and differences that can aid in the discovery of new disease causing genes.
In addition to analyzing these large datasets using traditional methods, sophisticated new analyses are implemented. Besides differences between groups of samples, these methods can, for example, detect networks and pathways in the data and combine this information with phenotypic and genotypic data that is available for both the human and mouse samples. Making use of all the available data in this way will result in a more complete understanding of neuropsychatric disorders.