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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.
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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 makes available state-of-the-art instrumentation, primarily for use by MFGN investigators (e.g. 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).
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