This is an application for supplemental funding for a SCORE Program at New Mexico State University (NMSU) at Las Cruces. A goal of NMSU is to expand research at the institution for participation by ethnic minority students who desire to pursue careers in the biomedical science disciplines. The proposed SCORE Program has as its goals: (1) To significantly improve the capabilities of NMSU to conduct biomedically relevant research by increasing the numbers of faculty who conduct biomedical research, increasing the numbers of trained research personnel, increasing the inventory of specialized single-user research instrumentation, and improving the capacity to maintain research instrumentation; (ii) To significantly improve the quantity and quality of biomedical research conducted at NMSU by broadening grantsmanship efforts of faculty participants and increasing the numbers and quality of research publications; (iii) To integrate the activities of the SCORE Program with an anticipated RISE Program to maximize resources for training minority scientists in the biomedical sciences by engaging students in SCORE Program research projects; (iv) To increase the capacity of NMSU to self-evaluate, assess, and monitor its multi-component research programs by engaging trained personnel in the SCORE Program's evaluation plan and subjecting the Program to annual review by an external evaluation committee. This application contains research proposals for two research subprojects. One is a regular subproject and the other is a pilot subproject. Disciplines represented among these proposals include medical microbiology (Gustafson, pilot subproject) and organismal/cell biology (Shuster, regular subproject). The research topics of these subprojects include salicylate responses in the bacterial pathogen, Staphylococcus aureus (Gustafson), and regulation of mitosis and cytokinesis by the septation initiation network (SIN) signaling cascade in animal cells. NMSU has an existing SCORE Program which was initiated on June 1, 2000. This Program funds eleven regular and two pilot subprojects. The existing SCORE Program succeeded a 25-year old associate MBRS Program which advanced 327 underrepresented minority students (81% of participants) into post-baccalaureate training in the biomedical sciences during the period 1974-2000.
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