MRI: Acquisition of Equipment for a Microgenomics Facility

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A grant has been awarded to Kent State University under the direction of Dr. Mintz for the purchase of two instruments dedicated to measuring cell-specific gene expression. The first instrument is a laser capture microscope, which allows researchers to extract individual cells or groups of cells from tissues in order to analyze their contents. The second instrument is an Affymetrix GeneChip instrument system, which will allow researchers to analyze the expression patterns of thousands of genes simultaneously from just a few cells extracted using the laser capture microscope. With these instruments, researchers can examine differences in gene activity between different types of cells that are all mixed together in one tissue. This is of critical importance in understanding how individual cells serve different roles within one tissue.Many projects at Kent State in diverse areas of the life sciences will benefit from this instrumentation. Although these instruments are often used in genetic and molecular biology studies, we seek mainly to apply their power to ask questions in the areas of neuroendocrinology, reproductive physiology, environmental biology, and biochemistry. The Kent State Department of Biological Sciences has an ongoing collaboration with the departments of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science in the fields of computational neuroscience and bioinformatics, and these instruments will add many new possible directions for that collaboration.In addition to the benefits to Kent State's research programs, this instrumentation will have a significant impact on the educational experience we can give our students. Experience with this modern equipment through individual research mentoring by faculty will strongly benefit both our graduate and undergraduate students, and significantly enhance their ability to obtain positions after completing their educations. In addition, the instrumentation will be incorporated into our summer cell and molecular biology workshop, used specifically to give formal training in techniques to interested students. Overall, this award will enhance the scientific productivity of both faculty and students at Kent State University and support new and exciting directions in research.