6/24/2025 – RGD announces a new Behavioral and Substance Use Disorder Portal
[image] Diseases of mental health are characterized by significant disturbance in cognition, emotional regulation and behavior (Mental disorders), and affect one in every eight people in the world. Behavioral and addiction diseases includes cognitive disorders, eating disorders, personality disorders, and substance-related disorders such as drug abuse, addiction and withdrawals. Genetic variations control considerable aspects of behavior (Understanding Drug Use and Addiction DrugFacts | National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)), for example it is estimated that genes account for half of a person’s risk for addiction.
The Behavioral and Substance Use Disorder Portal provides focused access to genes, ontologies, references, and tools. More than 17,000 genes and alleles have been implicated in diseases of mental health in human, over 700 of which are annotated for substance-related disorders. RGD curators reviewed large numbers of scientific literature references to make experimental annotations linking genes to disease in rat, mouse, human and seven more mammalian species. The Behavioral and Substance Use Disorder Portal page also includes listing over 50 rat strains designed to study behavior, 23 of which are annotated for substance-related disorders; each strain having its own report page for disease and phenotype annotations and references.
This portal facilitates further research by providing RGD tools designed for comparative analyses of diseases and associated genes, strains, phenotypes, and other ontologies. In particular RGD’s Multi-Ontology Enrichment Tool (MOET) is embedded within each Disease Portal for analyses. RGD has developed and previously released 15 other Disease Portals, which have a common landing page: Disease Portals Landing Page. Each Disease Portal provides access to gene annotations and report pages, references, analysis tools, rat strain models of disease, related resource links, and the ability to view and download genes involved in disorders, view genes in genomic context and compare them across species. In addition, Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) derived from publicly available human GWAS data are integrated into the portals.
For the Behavioral and Substance Use Disorder Portal, click HERE.