The broad goal of this proposal is to provide core support services for 39 principle investigators and 11 associated investigators to: (1) enhance the quality and quantity of their research; (2) facilitate collaborations between investigators with different backgrounds and skills; and (3) recruit new investigators to vision research. The PIs sort into several groups: psychophysics/systems neuroscience, visual transduction/retinal degeneration/gene therapy, eye (lens/ myopia/glaucoma), and clinical research. PIs hold individual research grants from NEI, and Associates hold individual grants from other sources. The Core includes 5 modules: ? Biostatistics provides expert assistance in experimental design and data analysis particularly for clinical studies. ? Computation-Illustration provides resources for scientific computing as well as expert computer support. ? Instrumentation provides for design and construction of optical and electrophysiological instruments that are unavailable from commercial sources. ? Molecular Biology provides DNA sequencing and gene mapping. ? Physiological Imaging, proposed here as a new module, would provide a new facility for multi-unit recording and an adjacent facility for optical recording of various functional signals from neural tissue in vitro, such as calcium, while imaging the whole cell by confocal microscopy. This module will greatly enhance the capabilities of the systems investigators and will provide new and efficient functional assays for investigators of molecular genetics and gene therapy. ? Altogether the Core accelerates our progress, improves opportunities for collaboration and helps translate basic research into clinical application. ? ? ?
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