Dennis Vitkup, PhD

Professor, Department of Systems Biology

Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

Host(s): Carol Mason (Faculty)

Toward a Unified Neurobiological Model of Mental Disorders (UNIMED)

Psychiatric disorders often share clinical symptoms and display high comorbidity, and genome-wide studies of rare and common variants have revealed substantial shared genetic risk across disorders. Yet whether this genetic pleiotropy reflects convergent cellular or circuit-level vulnerabilities remains poorly understood. Recent advances in multiscale systems biology of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia now enable the development of a Unified Neurobiological Model of Mental Disorders (UNIMED). This theory describes how genetic and environmental insults propagate through multiple levels of biological organization — from mutations to genes to cellular networks to brain cell types and circuits — to produce various psychiatric phenotypes. I will describe how our recent analyses of rare and common genetic mutations associated with psychiatric disorders help to distinguish shared perturbations, responsible for the neurobiological P-factor (psychiatric factor), from cell type and circuit-specific alterations that likely underlie disorder-specific phenotypes.

Relevant Publications:

Autism Mutations Preferentially Target Distributed Brain Circuits and Cell Types Associated with Sensory Integration and Decision Making 

Rare mutations implicate CGE interneurons as a vulnerable axis of cognitive deficits across psychiatric disorders

Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. 

More information and a full schedule can be found here.