The objectives of this project are several-fold. First, to provide an animal facility with BL3 capability, in order to maintain a variety of laboratory animals, including mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, goats, and non-human primates (principally rhesus and pigtail macaques). Second, to provide housing, veterinary care, routine health surveillance and standard technical and veterinary assistance for performance of routine procedures necessary for animal experimentation. Third, to provide veterinary assistance for performance of surgical procedures and postmortem examinations, and clinical laboratory support for analysis of animal materials, including pathological examinations. Fourth, to provide personnel to carry out routine virological experiments including infecting animals with viruses, determining the viral infectivity and pathogenicity, characterizing immune responses, and conducting viral challenge experiments. Fifth, to provide BL2/BL3 laboratory facilities for carrying out cell biological and immunological experiments in support of the animal experimentation. Sixth, to carry out in vitro immunologic and cell biologic experiments, including virus isolation and titering, Western blotting, and ELISAs in support of the animal experiments. Seventh, to prepare, characterize, purify, and store monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. Eighth, to conduct experiments of in vivo tumorigenicity, and passage and characterize any resultant tumors. Finally, to provide storage space at -7O degrees C and liquid nitrogen temperatures for tissues, body fluids, and cell cultures resulting from these experiments.
