Melanie Carless, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

University of Texas at San Antonio

Department of Neuroscience, Developmental and Regenerative Biology

Dr. Melanie Carless is investigating how changes in microRNA expression regulate gene expression to influence variation in neuroanatomical and neurocognitive endophenotypes, and how this variation might play a role in psychiatric disorders.

Recently, Dr. Carless’s laboratory has identified several microRNAs whose expressions are both heritable and appear to influence neuroanatomical traits associated with depression.

In addition, Dr. Carless and her colleagues have uncovered evidence that genomic methylation within a number of genes is correlated with many metabolic syndrome-related phenotypes, such as measures of obesity, blood pressure and insulin and glucose levels; as well as with neuroanatomical and neurocognitive traits.

Dr. Carless has also continued to assess the role genetic variation in depression and neurological traits, identifying several variants within an important psychiatric-related gene that contribute to differences in neuroanatomical and neurocognitive traits.

Research & Grants

Associated Diseases: Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, post traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome

Techniques Used: Next-generation sequencing, differentiation if iPSCs, epigenetic editing, microarrays, pyrosequencing, cell culture

Sub-Field of Study: Neuropsychiatric disease, metabolic disorders
Publications

Carless MA, Glahn DC, Johnson MP, Curran JE, Bozaoglu K, Dyer T, Winkler A, Cole S, Almasy L, MacCluer J, Duggirala R, Moses E, Göring HHH, Blangero J. (2011). Impact of DISC1 variation on neuroanatomical and neurocognitive phenotypes. Mol Psychiatry 16(11): 1096-104. PMCID: PMC3135724.

Kulkarni H, Kos MZ, Neary J, Dyer TD, Kent JW Jr, Göring HHH, Cole SA, Comuzzie AG, Almasy L, Mahaney MC, Curran JE, Blangero J, Carless MA. (2015). Novel epigenetic determinants of type 2 diabetes in Mexican American families. Hum Mol Genet 24(18): 5330-44. PMCID: PMC4550817.

Mamtani M, Kulkarni H, Dyer TD, Göring HH, Neary JL, Cole SA, Kent JW, Kumar S, Glahn DC, Mahaney MC, Comuzzie AG, Almasy L, Curran JE, Duggirala R, Blangero J, Carless MA. (2016). Genome- and epigenome-wide association study of hypertriglyceridemic waist in Mexican American families. Clin Epigenetics 8:6. PMCID: PMC4721061.

Hodgson K, Carless MA, Kulkarni H, Curran JE, Sprooten E, Knowles EE, Mathias S, Göring HHH, Yao N, Olvera RL, Fox PT, Almasy L, Duggirala R, Blangero J, Glahn DC. (2017). Epigenetic Age Acceleration Assessed with Human White-Matter Images. J Neurosci 37(18):4735-43. PMCID: PMC5426566.

Neary JL, Perez SM, Peterson K, Lodge DJ, Carless MA. (2017). Comparative analysis of MBD-seq and MeDIP-seq and estimation of gene expression changes in a rodent model of schizophrenia. Genomics 109(3-4):204-213. PMCID: PMC5526217.