Symposium on the Emerging Genetics and Neurobiology of Severe Mental Illness

This two-day symposium, chaired by Drs. Steve Hyman, Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the ӳ��ý and Guoping Feng of McGovern Institute at MIT and Director of the Model Systems group of the Stanley Center, will bring together leading scientists working on the genetics and neurobiology of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and related neuropsychiatric disorders. The illnesses highlighted in this symposium cause lifelong disability to millions of persons – combined, more than 3% of the world population are affected by one of these severe disorders. This is an exciting moment in the science, as results emerging from large-scale genetics studies are revealing shared and unshared risk factors across multiple disorders, and more importantly are beginning to coalesce around molecular mechanisms underlying these diseases. In the coming years neuroscientists will be increasingly able to put the emerging genetics to work in the service of new understandings of pathophysiology, the development of biomarkers, and much needed new treatments. We hope, particularly, to attract graduate students and postdoctoral associates to this symposium in order to build this interdisciplinary field at a time of opportunity.

Day 1

7:45	Registration and Breakfast
8:45 - 9:00	Welcome

Session 1: Recent Advances in Genetics Chair:
9:00 – 12:40	Population isolates in identifying low frequency variants in neurodevelopmental disorders
	CNVs conferring risk of schizophrenia affect cognition and brain structure in control carriers Hreinn Stefansson
	De novo mutations; convergence from CNVs and exome sequencing identifies synaptic pathology in schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders
	When, where and what (cell types): moving from genomics to biology in autism spectrum disorders
10:40 – 11:00	Break
	Psychiatric Genomics Consortium quadruples schizophrenia GWAS sample size to 35,000 cases and 47,000 controls
	Design of PsychChip and analysis of rare coding variation in schizophrenia
	Complex variation and the genome’s missing pieces – what does whole genome sequencing have to teach us
	Late Breaking Talk (15 min) A statistical framework to interpret the role of de novo variation in psychiatric disease Kaitlin Samocha
	Genetics session wrap-up (10 min)
12:40 – 1:40	Lunch

Session 2: Emerging Neurobiological Mechanisms Chair:
1:40 – 4:55	Testing the possibility of synaptic dysfunction in schizophrenia
	Neural mechanisms underlying social reward
	High throughput screens for synaptogenic factors
	Genetic buffering and synaptic homeostasis in autism spectrum disorders
3:20 – 3:40	Break
	Circuit-specific synaptic dysfunction in autism
	Immune mechanisms of synapse loss in health and disease
	Hippocampal-prefrontal connectivity in a mouse model of the 22q11 microdeletion syndrome
5:00	Poster session, reception and dinner buffet McGovern Institute Atrium Building 46 – MIT

Day 2

8:00 – 9:00	Breakfast

Session 3: Enabling Technologies Chair:
9:00 – 12:20	Characterization of noncoding variants in schizophrenia Kai-How (Kyle) Farh
	Programming and reprogramming neuronal diversity in the cerebral cortex
	A stem cell approach for deciphering the results of genome-wide studies in psychiatric disease
	10:15 – 10:40	Break
	Genome Engineering: Technologies and Applications
	Reading large-scale neural codes in freely behaving mice, in brain areas implicated in mental illness
	Tools for Mapping Brain Computations
	Optical deconstruction of fully-assembled biological systems
12:20 – 1:15	Lunch

Session 4: Translational Research and Target Identification Chair:
1:15 – 2:55	Bridging genetics to drug discovery Dan Curtis
	A synaptic functional approach to CNS drug discovery
	Quantitative proteomics to identify protein-small molecule interactions in primary neurons Monica Schenone
	Establishing an unbiased, scalable functional assay for neurons using multielectrode array recording Jen Pan
2:55 – 3:15	Break
3:15 – 3:30	Development of D2R β-arrestin biased antagonists for the treatment of schizophrenia Michael Lewis
3:30 – 3:45	Late Breaking Talk (15 min) Genetic modulation of neuronal competition homeostasis in the adult dentate gyrus to enhance hippocampal functions Kathleen McAvoy
3:45 – 5:00	Panel Discussion: Polices and Future Directions
	Steven Hyman
5:00	Closing Remarks Steven Hyman