PROJECT SUMMARY: CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY CORE The Cellular and Molecular Biology Core provides essential equipment and support for molecular biology, cell culture, histology, and virology. Importantly, the Core contains a number of specialized instruments that are either too costly for individual investigators, necessary but infrequently used, or require skilled assistance to use. The goals are to provide facilities, expertise, and services for: 1) establishing, expanding, and maintaining primary cells, stem cells, and transformed, transfected, and inducible cell lines as well as organ cultures for use in vision research, 2) performing cellular and molecular biology experiments for ophthalmic research that require use of specialized instrumentation, 3) assisting and coordinating experiments that involve cell culturing, transfection, viral packaging, primer design, cloning, construction of mammalian and viral vectors, flow cytometry, laser capture microdissection, DNA sequencing, real time PCR, DNA/microRNA microarray, Luminex, proteomics, and protein analyses, and 4) assisting in histologic and morphological studies of tissue specimens and cultured cells.