The University of Southern California and Buck Institute Nathan Shock Center

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ABSTRACT OF SUPPLEMENT Our Nathan Shock Center (NSC) of Excellence (P30 AG068345) provides access to geroscience technology, research training, and research support for geroscientists across the United States. NSCs focus on the basic biology of aging and thus use a variety of methodologies and technologies to advance our understanding of geroscience. Users of our NSC study a variety of biological variables at the molecular, cell, tissue, organ, and organismal levels. In addition to the requests from the geroscience community to use the vast resources of our Geroscience Technology Core (GTC) and the expertise of our NSC faculty at USC, we are often asked if we can couple these powerful studies with microscopy and visual measurements. Currently, high resolution and multiplex imaging is not a service that is available at our NSC and represents an unmet need of the community of geroscience researchers that utilize our NSC cores. In order to advance the availability of microscopy technology for the geroscience research projects performed at USC, we propose the purchase of the Zeiss LSM 980 confocal microscope - currently the fastest super-resolution system that enables the acquisition of a wide range of molecular, cellular, tissue, and organismal details of live samples. These measures are essential to our ability to fully understand the underlying basis of aging and age-related diseases across all hierarchical levels. Our administrative supplement will establish a powerful new tool in the arsenal of technologies in the Geroscience Technology Core (GTC). These new technologies represent an unexpected opportunity for USC to advance the imaging research capacity, available to all geroscience users of our NSC services at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at USC. As such, our administrative supplement will greatly impact geroscience nation-wide.