Overview. As before, this Core consists of two components:A General Administrative Component, and a Mouse Management Component.The General Administrative Component works to maintain the cohesiveness of the whole program and itsfunctions by organizing group meetings, retreats and journal clubs, and by dealing with any and all inter-Departmental or Institutional issues that arise. It also organizes internal and external reviews of the program,as well as making sure that renewal applications are submitted in a timely fashion. It regularly tracks thefinancial status of the program on a monthly basis, and assists in hiring and other personnel issues. Inaddition, the Core identifies newly published literature relevant to the program, and distributes to theappropriate investigators within the program. The goal of the administrative component is to make certain thatthe entire program functions as efficiently and optimally as possible.The Mouse Management Component supports 1 full time and one part-time animal technician. Theseindividuals who are fully trained and engaged in the maintenance of gene-targeted and transgenic mousemodels proposed in the individual projects. This component has the necessary equipment and space in apathogen-free mouse-specific vivarium, as detailed below. The actual production of new mouse models will bedone through the currently established UCSD Transgenic Mouse and Embryonic Stem Cell Gene TargetingCore, please see http://cancer.ucsd.edu/Research/Shared/tgm/default2.asp. This state-of-the-art facility wasoriginally started with major support and advice from J. Marth (Project 1 leader) and has since developed anexcellent track record in the production of genetically altered mice. Thus, rather than doing gene targetingourselves, it now makes sense for this program to pay via fee-for-service for the generation of mice throughthis established UCSD Core. While the total costs are about the same, we avoid duplicative functions at theinstitution. Since our past experience with this approach has been good, we have decided to continue it in thecurrent proposal.Budgetary Approach: Based on our experience to date, we also feel it is best to keep the daily managementand breeding of mice, the animal technicians involved, the costs of mouse cage space, and the use ofapproaches such a Speed Congenics (see below) as a Core function - rather than allocating resources to eachproject for these activities. This approach also allows the maximum flexibility in accommodating the needs ofall the projects, which will vary from year to year. While this makes for a rather large budget for an'Administrative Core', most of the budget is actually for mouse-related costs. The administrative componentbudget remains very much the same as in the previous version of the grant.
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