The proposed program is designed to motivate minority faculty members to engage in biomedical research, strengthen the institution's capabilities to train students for graduate and health professional study, provide opportunities for minority students to gain biomedical research experience, and interest students in pursuing Ph.D. degrees and research careers in the biomedical sciences. To this end the subprojects are: 1) REPRESENTATIONS OF EMOTIONAL LEXICAL AND CONTEXTUAL SIMILARITIES. The cognitive representations of lexical and contextual similarities of all syntactic forms (noun, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) of emotional opposition and similarity (synonymous) concepts are assessed employing newer methods of data collection. The data serve a tests for the validity of various psychological theories of the representations and acquisitions of meaning in general, and of emotionality, in particular. New sorting data on contextual discriminability and interval scale ratings of lexical relatedness of emotional concepts are also introduced. 2) POLYMORPHISM OF TAP GENES IN GRAVES' DISEASE PATIENTS. Basic and sophisticated molecular genetic techniques of molecular biology will be used to detect genetic polymorphisms at the DNA level in African-American unrelated volunteer controls, and in Graves' Disease patients and their family members. HLA associations with Graves' disease have been reported for both Class I and Class II antigens. This study will add to the pool of knowledge on whether it is Class I and define the boundaries of the region within the major histocompatibility complex that determines susceptibility to Graves' Disease. There re new alleles to be detected.
| Ofosu, M H; Brown, C; Cheatham, W et al. (1998) TAP1 polymorphism identified in African-American Graves' disease patients. Immunol Invest 27:281-9 |
| Ofosu, M H; Dunston, G; Henry, L et al. (1996) HLA-DQ3 is associated with Graves' disease in African-Americans. Immunol Invest 25:103-10 |
