PhD student working in the Complex Genetics section, Dept of Medical Genetics, UMC Utrecht, with visits to UCLA to enhance collaboration with Roel Ophoff's group there.
E-mail: s.dejong-6@umcutrecht.nl
Telephone: +31 (0)88 756 8790
Research project: Gene expression studies of neuropsychiatric traits in human and mouse
Supervisor: Prof. R.A. Ophoff, PhD
Summary
Complex neuropsychiatric disorders are often debilitating and their course is unpredictable. Consequently, they have a big impact on both the patient’s quality of life 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 mean 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 on schizophrenia and expression data from schizophrenic patients and healthy controls are available to investigate the pathology of this disorder. The mouse data involves looking at differences in selected brain areas between different inbred mouse 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 the disease-causing genes.
In addition to analyzing these large datasets using traditional methods, sophisticated new analyses are being implemented. Besides the differences between groups of samples, these methods can detect networks and pathways in the data and we can combine this information with phenotypic and genotypic data available for both the human and mouse samples. Making use of all the available data in this way will lead to a more complete understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders.