The San Diego State University MBRS program was designed to provide a quality biomedical research experience for talented minority students. Ten minority undergraduates and 10 minority graduate students will be involved in the biomedical research in the laboratories of 10 established biomedical researchers who are experienced in the training of students. We have selected the mechanism of the MBRS Associate Investigator program as a vehicle to reach our institutional objective, the National Institutes of Health, and one of the MBRS objectives of trying to rectify the under- representation of minorities in biomedical research. The research interest of the Associate Investigator were selected to tap into the varied biomedical research interests of our minority students. This application consists of 10 subprojects from established funded biomedical researchers. These productive researchers are from the Departments of: Biology, Chemistry, Communicative Disorders, Health Science, Graduate School of Public Health, and Psychology. The research projects proposed are diverse and include projects in: molecular and genetic aspects of muscle contraction, drug addiction recovery, muscle physiology, respiratory health intervention, muscle dynamics, developmental psycholinguistics and neuropsychology, language disorder risk, lymphocyte receptors, molecular basis of cell fusion, and DNA replication and the cell cycle.
