The purpose off the Institutional Development Award (IdeA) Program is to foster health-related research and increase the competitiveness of investigators through support of faculty development and enhancement of the research infrastructure of institution located in states with historically low aggregate success rates of grant awards from the NIH (RFA +RR-00- 003). Thus, we propose to establish a Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE), with the thematic focus of Functional genomic/Proteomic Analysis of Bacterial-Host Interactions. This COBRE will exploit one of the few areas of biomedical research where Oklahoma has been in the forefront in recent years, which is the genome-scale analysis of bacterial pathogenesis. Currently, there are five ongoing NIH- supported pathogen genome sequencing programs conducted within the state, including the soon-to-be-completed genome sequence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which was the first pathogen genome sequencing project funded by NIH. We therefore propose to build on this unique opportunity by exploring functional genomic and proteome analysis to examine the pathogenesis of five major human pathogens: 1) Neisseria gonorrhoeae, 2) Borrelia burgdorferi, 3) Escherichia coli 0157:H7, 4) Campylobacter jejuni and 5) Bacillus anthracis. The proposed COBRE will be headed by an established NIH-funded investigator and includes three new investigators and an established investigator who do not have a prior history of NIH R01 support. This is a state-wide initiative that includes the thre major publicly-supported research institutions in the state of Oklahoma: 1) the University of Oklahoma (OU), 2) the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), institute located near the OUHSC campus. The project is organized similarly to a typical program project grant, facilities on each campus to support the five participating investigators. This strategy will allow each investigator to sufficiently develop their research program to become competitive for additional NIH R01 support. The proposed core facilities also will provide other investigators in Oklahoma with the technical support necessary to expand their own research programs into the burgeoning area of genome-scale analysis of problems of biomedical interest.
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