This continuation of the San Diego State University MBRS Program is designed to provide a quality biomedical research experience for talented minority students. Six minority undergraduates and 13 minority graduate students will be involved in 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, and the objectives of the National Institutes of Health, and one of the MBRS objectives of trying to rectify the underrepresentation of minorities in biomedical research. The research interests of the Associate Investigator were selected to tap into the varied biomedical research interests of our minority students. The application consists of ten projects, six from Associate Investigators who participated in the first cycle of our MBRS program and four new Associate Investigators. These productive funded researchers are from the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Communicative Disorders, and Psychology. The biomedical research projects are diverse and reflect the interest of the students in the applicant pool. The projects include research in the areas of molecular and genetic aspects of muscle contraction, muscle physiology, genetic analysis of muscle specific genes, viral mediated transfer of T cells, characterization of viral protein, developmental psycholinguistics, Ca2+ and cardia muscle contraction, language disorder risks, lymphocyte receptors, and DNA replication and the cell cycle.
