PREGNANCY, HYPOXIA AND TRANSCRIPTIONAL REGULATION OF NO

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's abstract) Dr. Margueritte White is an Assistant Professor of Medicine who has completed a joint clinical and research fellow-ship in Maternal Fetal Medicine through the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Cardiovascular Pulmonary Research Laboratory (CVP) at the University of Colorado. She is presently the recipient of the MIRS award which has supported her work in the CVP for the past 2 years and which ends in March 1998. She has recently completed a full year of graduate level courses required for Ph.D. candidates in the Molecular Biology Program (Advanced Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics, Cell Biology and Molecular Virology). Through her fellowship to date, she has worked under the mentorship of Dr. Lorna Moore in CVP, Professor of Medicine, who is nationally and internationally recognized for her human and animal studies on the effects of high altitude on maternal vascular adjustments to pregnancy. This collaboration has resulted in two first author peer-reviewed publications, one manuscript in preparation, and four abstracts presented at national meetings. In addition, Dr. White has contributed to and been co-author on additional publications and abstracts emanating from this work (biographical sketch). Dr. White's research has focused on the role of nitric oxide in altering vascular reactivity during pregnancy under normoxic and chronically hypoxic conditions. She is extending her studies, thus far performed in guinea pig isolated vessel rings, to a cellular level in order to investigate molecular mechanisms by which pregnancy and chronic hypoxia influence transcriptional regulation of the endothelial nitric oxide synthase gene. Towards that end, in addition to completing graduate courses in molecular biology, she has established a collaborative and mentoring relationship with Dr. Benamin Perryman, Professor of Medicine with joint appointments in the Department of Cell and Structural Biology and the interdepartmental Molecular Biology Program. This collaboration has resulted in a recent abstract presentation at a national meeting. Dr. White will carry out the proposed studies under the direct supervision of Drs. Lorna Moore and Ben Perryman in whose laboratories there is considerable expertise in studying vascular biology and mechanisms of gene regulation, respectively. Dr. White's project brings together expertise from two nationally recognized centers of excellence in both research and training, the Cardiovascular Pulmonary Lab and the Molecular Biology Program both in adjoining buildings within the School of Medicine. The strength of Dr. White's proposal lies in her application of state of the art techniques in molecular biology to explore questions of physiologic importance regarding maternal vascular adjustments to pregnancy.