Functional Assessment Core: Greg Cartee, Director The Functional Assessment Core (FAC) will promote the effective use of UM's rich set of Biomedical Research Core laboratories for studies in the cell biology, physiology, and molecular biology of aging. Rationale and goals: The University of Michigan has an exceptionally diverse range of well equipped research support cores, each supervised by experienced faculty members and employing highly skilled technicians, which facilitate biomedical science in multiple disciplines by providing resources beyond the reach of any one laboratory group. These Cores are in general subsidized by the University, and each charges a UM-certified recharge rate for its services. Of the more than fifty such Core Labs available on the UM campus, several are particularly likely to be valuable for Shock Center scientists. These include the Affymetrix and Microarray Core, the Animal Phenotyping Core Laboratory, the Biomedical Mass Spectrometry Facility, the Center for Integrative Genomics, the Center for Molecular Imaging, the DNA Sequencing Core, the Flow Cytometry Core, the Hybridoma Core, the Metabolomics Core, the Microscopy and Image Analysis Laboratory, the new shRNA Library Core, and the Viral Vector Core. Rather than attempt to duplicate or compete with any of these superb specialty groups, the FAC will work with UM biogerontologists to develop projects that make optimal use of one or more of these UM Cores, and then pay for 40% of the costs for FAC-approved projects. This system differs from that used by "Functional Assessment Cores" at some other Nathan Shock Centers. At NSCs that are not affiliated with major academic medical centers, it may well be necessary to use NSC funds to set up specialized core facilities to meet research objectives that could not otherwise be addressed. At larger research centers like UM, however, the challenge is not to develop such Core facilities from scratch, but rather to promote the use of these well-established facilities in support of biogerontological research. By providing guidance to NSC faculty on protocol development and Core resources, and by helping to pay for the costs of use of the UM Core facilities for selected projects, the FAC will leverage its limited funds to support research of special value and high relevance to the biology of aging.
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