Since all four Projects of this Program Project center around studies of uroplakins and their genes, they all need to use, repeatedly, a common set of reagents including purified urothelial plaques, plasmids containing uroplakin cDNAs and genes, antibodies to uroplakins, PCR primers for the amplification of uroplakin eDNA and genes, and cultured bovine urothelial cells. Obviously it would not be economical for each laboratory to generate and characterize all these reagents themselves. The purpose of this Molecular Biology Core is therefore to form a central supply of these important research tools that can be shared by every investigator in the Program Project. This offers several major advantages including cost-effectiveness, reproducible quality, ease of comparing data generated by separate Projects, and promotion of interactions among the PIs. In the following sections, we will describe the generation of these reagents, quality control, database, personnel, budget and its justification, the contribution of this Core to the individual Projects, and prioritization of usage. These have remained basically unchanged from the original application, with only minor modifications and updates. This Core has worked extremely well, as evidenced in the Progress Report (section D).
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