The Mississippi Functional Genomics Network (MFGN) is a competitively
funded NIH project with the mission of enhancing biomedical research
and training in the state of Mississippi. A central feature of the
project is to foster collaboration between laboratories at undergraduate
institutions (newly established in the early stages of the project)
and experienced NIH investigators at the research institutions in
Mississippi, particularly at UMMC (University of Mississippi Medical
Center in Jackson, MS), and at USM (University of Southern Mississippi
in Hattiesburg, MS). The primary rationale for this strategy is
to establish training pipelines that will enlarge the pool of domestic
undergraduates who continue on to graduate training. If successful
the hope is that this strategy could be applied in other states
and expand the talent pool of biomedical researchers throughout
the United States.
MFGN
laboratories study fundamental problems in biology-the eukaryotic
cell cycle, cytoskeletal organization, drug and stress resistance,
protein folding, and transcriptional regulation-with a focus on
the use of high-throughput functional genomics tools. To this end,
MFGN investigators make use of the model organism Saccharomyces
cerevisiae, which has emerged as the premiere biological system
for conducting genomic and high-throughput studies. MFGN also operates
centralized facilities that make available state of the art instrumentation
to MFGN investigators, including a Zeiss LSM-meta confocal laser-scanning
microscope, a robotic colony picking and arraying system (primarily
used by yeast researchers for synthetic genetic array [SGA] analysis),
microarrayers and microarray scanners, and a Thermo Finnigan HPLC
coupled ESI quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometer.
Go to the Mississippi Functional
Genomics Network website.
For
more information, contact us by sending email to genomics@usm.edu
Dr.
George Santangelo, MFGN Director
Dr.
Glen Shearer, MFGN Training and Mentoring Director
Dr.
Mohamed Elasri, MFGN Bioinformatics Director
Martha Sparrow, MFGN Coordinator
Mike
Goldman, MFGN Bioinformatics Coordinator
