Alcoholism is a serious condition that affects millions of people and costs billions of
dollars each year in treatment, damages, and lost income. In addition, it carries a
tremendous emotional burden. Alcoholism is caused by a combination of genetic
and environmental factors, which have yet to be fully identified. Fortunately,
alcoholism research, as well as research into other diseases with a genetic
component, has greatly benefited from recent rapid developments in
high-throughput genomic technologies and the development of relevant model
organisms. This has been highly productive for progress in the field, but effective
methods for identifying relevant data and for performing cross-dataset analyses
have not been developed at the same pace.
To help fulfill this need, I have developed the INIA (Integrative Neuroscience
Initiative on Alcoholism) Texas Gene Expression Database (IT-GED), which is freely
available at http://inia.icmb.utexas.edu. IT-GED is a web-based database which
contains a compilation of the significantly expressed genes from each of several
microarray datasets investigating the role of gene expression in the brain's
regulation of alcohol consumption. The studies were performed both in model
organisms (mouse and rat) and post-mortem humans. The data is presented via a
user-friendly interface which provides advanced searching abilities for identifying
genes of interest and tools for analysis of the data. These tools provide the ability to
compare user data to every dataset in IT-GED in order to assess the significance of
a group of genes across multiple datasets and the ability to generate visual
networks of those genes in order to identify the ones that are likely the most
functionally significant in the response to high alcohol consumption.
IT-GED thus provides a means by which alcohol researchers can combine multiple
sources of data to generate novel hypotheses concerning the genetic causes of
alcoholism. The goal of IT-GED is to provide support for comparing and integrating
results across gene expression studies of alcohol consumption and for generating
novel hypotheses based on individual genes and gene-gene interactions by
simplifying data access, providing various tools for analysis, and presenting users
with an easy-to-use interface.BiochemistryWaggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Researc
