UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Computational Psychiatry: Bridging the Gap between Genes and Symptoms" Dr. Christoph Metzner (Biocomputation Research Group, School of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire) 2 November 2016 (Wednesday) 1 - 2 pm Hatfield, College Lane Campus Seminar Room D102 Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: Over the last years, the traditional diagnostic classifications used in psychiatry have been questioned and a breakdown into simpler categories like endophenotypes or cognitive domains has been proposed. This is mainly due to the fact that the gap between symptom-based classifications on the one hand and genes and molecules on the other hand is huge and a clear mapping in between not in sight. Underlying these new proposals is the hope that the simpler categories will map nicely to alterations at the genetic/molecular level. However, this hope might be overly optimistic. Not only are disorders such as schizophrenia highly polygenic (more than 100 risk genes have been identified), the proposed network-level endophenotypes can potentially be produced by a myriad of different configurations on the cellular level (multifactoriality). In order to overcome these limitations, the use of biophysically detailed computational models in psychiatry has been proposed, which enable the implementation of genetic alterations and the exploration of their multifactorial interplay. In this talk I present some efforts of myself and some collaborators to contribute to this new computational psychiatry effort. I will describe a model of auditory click entrainment deficits in schizophrenic patients which incorporates experimentally identified synaptic and circuit abnormalities in patients and explores how their interaction might give rise to experimentally observed deficits. Furthermore, I will describe the approach taken by some of my collaborators in Norway, who started to translate the results from genome-wide association studies into computational models, which focused on intracellular abnormalities. Last, I will discuss our joint efforts to combine both lines of research. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://cs-colloq.cs.herts.ac.uk