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INIA GOALS AND PURPOSE
Chronic exposure to alcohol results in neuroadaptive phenomena, including tolerance, sensitization, dependence, withdrawal, loss of control of drinking, and relapse that contribute to the development of excessive alcohol consumption. The Consortium INIA (Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism) will be tasked to identify the molecular, cellular, and behavioral neuroadaptations that occur in the brain reward circuits associated with the extended amygdala and its connections. It is hypothesized that genetic differences and/or neuroadaptations in this circuitry are responsible for the individual differences in vulnerability to the excessive consumption of alcohol. Our goals are:
1) To establish animal models to study specific neurobiological targets for vulnerability that lead to excessive consumption of alcohol at the molecular, cellular and neural circuit level of analysis,2) To identify specific clusters of genes whose expression is regulated by alcohol and which are responsible for any given model of excessive alcohol consumption using gene expression arrays, differential display, mutagenesis directed at specific brain areas, and the development of new informatics tools to analyze and interpret gene expression, cellular circuitry and brain circuitry data with the use of transgenic and knockout approaches, and
3) To attract new and innovative investigators to the field of alcohol research by recruiting individuals for development of U01 grants and pilot projects and by developing online interactive capacity among INIA scientists and others, and by making the neuroinformatics integrated data sets accessible, searchable and interactive with other databases for all scientists interested in alcoholism research.