The Molecular and Morphology core facility provides state of the art expertise to the five individual projects on a variety of molecular and structurally related technologies. The Molecular component provides expertise in the areas of RT-PCR on tissues and on dispersed isolated interstitial cells of Cajal, enteric neurons and smooth muscle cells. The molecular component continues to provide day to day maintenance of genomic clones, cDNAs and cultures for molecular biological investigations. The core has automated DNA sequencers (ABI 310, and an ABI 7700) to perform DNA sequence analysis on novel clones, amplification products and transgenic samples. The molecular component provides routine genotyping of transgenic animals for all applicable projects and animals of interest, designs and tests primers for RT-PCR and constructs vectors for proposed experiments. This component of the core also provides support with mammalian cell lines expressing various project specific cDNAs. The morphology component of the core provides expertise in a variety of imaging techniques to support the morphological needs to individual projects. These technologies cover the areas of conventional light microscopy, phase contrast microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, laser scanning confocal microscopy (real time and standard 3-dimensional reconstruction of fixed tissues), digital imaging, transmission electron microscopy, in-situ hybridization, immunoohistochemistry and immuno-electron microscopy (immunogold and diaminobenzidine reactions). Other areas that the core has recently developed are calcium imaging of ICC-MY networks using fluo-4, coupled with real time confocal microscopy. The core also provides support in the area of spatio-temporal mapping of excitability within the gastrointestinal tract. The morphology core will also be able to provide FRET analysis in the near future to projects interested in analyzing the interactions of proteins within the plasma membrane or cytoplasm. The quality of the output of the core can be assessed by the images on several front covers of papers that were published in Gastroenterology and American Journal of Physiology.
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