Upgrating Biomedical Facilities--UPR-Rio Piedras Campus

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The SCORE Program at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR)-Rio Piedras Campus, College of Natural Sciences currently involves 17 faculty investigators, 5 research associates and 13 laboratory technicians in 17 research projects at the Departments of Biology and Chemistry. Recently, the continued development of a competitive research core in genomics and functional genomics was identified as a key priority for the Biology Department. This included the future recruitment of two new researchers in this area and the expansion of the sequencing facility. This application requests funds for the upgrading of the sequencing and genotyping facilities by doubling its capacity, to establish computational infrastructure to link the core genomic facilities and to implement a Laboratory Information Management system. In the Department of Chemistry, the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) laboratory continues to serve the research community by providing advanced NMR analytical services, training and consultation that enables scientists around the island to investigate complex systems and obtain unambiguous details about their structure and composition. Nonetheless it has become necessary to replace a fifteen year old obsolete instrument with a more powerful instrument equipped with accessories that will allow for high resolution NMR spectroscopy and for the acquisition of higher quality data in a fraction of the time taken by traditional non-gradient pulse sequences. To effect the upgrade of the NMR facilities this application is requesting funds for a new 500 MHz multinuclear, pulsed field gradient system. The expansion, upgrade and integration of the core facilities for genomic research will significantly improve the ability to generate and manage sequence, genotype and gene expression data, a cornerstone of modern biomedical research. This will impact 11 faculty investigators from the Biology and Chemistry Departments. In a similar manner the new NMR spectrometer will allow 7 SCORE investigators to explore new research problems, further advance their research goals and obtain higher quality data in shorter times with the new generation of selective ID experiments, the gradient versions of the common 2D experiments and newer advanced hybrid 2D NMR sequences.