The proportion of underrepresented minorities (URMs) earning doctorate degrees in the basic biomedical sciences has increased modestly over the past few decades. Our proposed Program, the South Texas Advanced Research Training Undergraduate Program (START-UP) is a response to a Funding Opportunity Announcement from the Blueprint Program for Enhancing Neuroscience Diversity through Undergraduate Research Education Experiences (BP-ENDURE).

Progression of renal disease leads to common consequences including interstitial fibrosis, glomerulosclerosis, vascular narrowing, and renal failure, ultimately requiring dialysis or renal transplantation. The kidney myofibroblast is the cell type most responsible for matrix accumulation during renal fibrosis.

UT-MSTAR program The University of Texas Medical Students Training in Aging Research Program (UT-MSTAR) is an experienced training program funded by the National Institute of Aging that seeks to educate medical students in pursuing research related to improving elders' care and to positively influence them to follow a career focused on serving older adults' health needs.

This renewal application requests 3 years of support to continue a highly successful international scientific meeting entitled Behavior, Biology and Chemistry: Translational Research in Addiction (BBC) that has been held annually in San Antonio Texas since 2009. In addition to this grant as well as a previous NIH grant, BBC meetings have received significant financial and institutional support from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and several other universities.

Rab7 and estrogen-ER as B cell-intrinsic mediators of auto/antibody responses.

A competing renewal of R01 award MH074457 (currently in year 9) is requested. The R01 seeking renewal sustains the BrainMap Project (www.brainmap.org). The overall goal of the BrainMap Project is to provide the human brain mapping community with data sets, computational tools, and related resources that enable quantitative meta-analyses and co-activation mapping and functional decoding of neuroimaging data.

Microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ) repairs DNA breaks by annealing 2-20 bp of flanking microhomology (MH), yielding repair products with deletions of MH and inter-MH sequences. MMEJ is thus a highly error prone repair mechanism with a strong propensity to lead to chromosomal translocations and cancer-causing mutations. Accordingly, the breakpoint junctions of many oncogenic chromosomal translocations feature MH, underscoring the importance of this mechanism for the development chromosome instability and carcinogenesis.

The NIA Interventions Testing Program represents a multi-site translational research program to evaluate agents hypothesized to extend mouse lifespan by retardation of aging or postponement of late life diseases.

This proposal is a competitive renewal of R01NS045879 'Stroke Imaging of Conscious Rats.' In the previous grant cycle, we reported over two dozen peer-reviewed publications and leveraged multiple foundation grants to expand stroke research. Stroke remains to be the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of long-term disability.

The proposed work innovatively addresses serious and long-standing limitations in the evidence supporting the standard relapse model. The important role of the standard model both in pre-clinical research into relapse and in clinical treatments to prevent relapse make it important to strongly test the assumptions of the standard model. This work could result in a strong validation of the standard model and improved animal models for developing medications designed to prevent relapse and craving.