The Molecular Cellular and Genetic Core (MCGC) is being reviving in the Center for the purpose of providing expertise in the areas of molecular and cell biology and assisting in the construction of various vectors used in the proposed studies within the Center. The MCGC will provide all the scientific components the primary cultures from multant mice needed for their studies. The MCGC also will maintain lines of mutant mice that are used by multiple components and are highly requested by the scientific community. By centralizing all these functions in MCGC will allow not only substantial cost saving but also the standardization of the reagents, vectors, cultures and animals in all the projects within the Center. Therefore, the specific aims of MCGC are: 1) To establish banks of reagents and cell models to be used by Center's investigators. The revived MCGC will resume the duties in maintaining the inventories of vectors, bacteria strains, libraries and cell lines generated by the Center investigators from Administrative Core. MCGC will be responsible for sending out any request for the reagents and cell models, and expand the inventories to include viral and vector constructs that are useful for the in vitro primary culture and in vivo animal studies. 2) To provide expertise in the areas of molecular and cell biology to Center's investigators. The MCGC will consult on the construction of the various mammalian expression vectors, or targeting vectors for the development of genetic altered animals. In addition, MCGC will assist in constructing the siRNA vector and viral vectors for delivery the siRNA ortransgenes to be used by the Center's investigators. 3) To maintain a bank of mutant mouse models for the Center's investigators. In order to eliminate the drain in the individual investigator's resources, MCGC will maintain breeding colonies of mouse models so as to fulfill the requests by the Center's investigators and external investigators. 4) To provide primary cultures from wild type and mutant mice for the studies of opioid receptor action. The use of primary cultures as models is a common theme among all 5 scientific components of this proposed Center. Especially, the use of primary neurons from mutant mouse models is critical for establishing the validating of the cell models'observations. Thus, the MCGC will initiate the program of supplying primary cultures to Center's investigators. This program not only could utilize the primary cultures obtained from mutant mice more efficiently, it could also standardize the quality of the primary among all investigators within the Center.
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