The Monkey Alcohol Tissue Research Resource (MATRR) is a multiple PI research resource award from Oregon Health & Science University, Baylor University, and Wake Forest Health Science. The MATRR was established to provide the alcohol research community access to tissue and data generated from cohorts of monkeys that have been subjected to the same voluntary alcohol self-administration protocol. In this procedure, monkeys show a wide distribution of average daily ethanol intakes (g/kg) encompassing low, binge, heavy and very heavy chronic intake patterns. Our necropsy procedure is fully refined and allows for the harvesting of brain slices that are rapidly frozen or prepared for ex vivo electrophysiological and neurochemical analyses. Prior to necropsy, registered users and other interested parties are contacted for any custom preparations, otherwise the frozen tissue remain in the MATRR until requests are made through a dedicated web resource. All tissues are accompanied by organismal and alcohol intake data to aid in rapid publication of findings. Importantly, the MATRR provides an opportunity for laboratories with specific expertise in neuroscience, organ pathology, and genetic analyses the ability to extend their research to a primate model with similar genetics, developmental processes, endocrinology, immunology, physiology and neuroanatomy to humans. Thus, the MATRR is unique to the alcohol research field in promoting a translational resource for mechanistic studies of alcohol-induced pathologies. The MATRR resource has exceeded all expectations in terms of tissue generation, inventory control, tissue requests, tissue utilization, data analytics, novel daa generated, publications, newly funded projects and new research directions. In terms of tissue generation, currently there are tissues and data from 13 cohorts of monkeys available for request. In this renewal, we propose to add 10 more cohorts, bringing the total number of monkey to 248 (182 ethanol, 66 control) to allow a critical number for genetic and neuroimaging datasets. The inventory control has been aided by a unique web-based interface that also serves to administratively evaluate and act upon tissue requests. We have provided over 2,100 tissue samples, with MTAs filed prior to sending and timely progress reports automatically requested. The resource has been extremely successful in the number of publications (42) and funded applications (33) from 26 Principal Investigators at 11 sites. There remain great opportunities in further building and refining this resource. Our goal is to have the MATRR bioinformatics integrate data across disciplines, organs and individuals to generate knew knowledge of chronic alcohol use disorders. Finally, we acknowledge that in addition to building critical numbers for large-scale data analyses, the opportunity exists to study additional tissue, such as fetal alcohol exposure, and additional datasets such as resting state functional imaging MRI.
The Monkey Alcohol Tissue Research Resource is unique to the alcohol research field in promoting a translational resource for mechanistic and genetic studies of alcohol-induced pathologies in primates with known alcohol intake. The introduction of a fully interactive website and analytics toolset, together with the foundation to dynamically interact with external data resources and research domains, allows the resource to advance holistic data integration for alcohol research.
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