ABSTRACT - Overall The University of Washington (UW) is internationally known for its excellence in all aspects of skeletal muscle biology, especially in mechanistic and translational research of diseases. However, there is currently no centralizing resource that brings together all the muscle investigators from multiple departments for the benefit of facilitating and accelerating their efforts. Therefore we propose the UW Resource Center for Translational Muscle Research (CTMR) to provide a unifying resource and state of the art approaches to enhance skeletal muscle research at the UW. The proposed Center will offer tools, facilities and expertise in a combination available only at the UW to facilitate novel insights to muscle pathologies and move new therapeutics towards the clinic and the marketplace. This new Center will offer 4 cores (one administrative and three research resource) to provide tools and expertise in several areas of interest to current principal investigators. The Administrative Core (A) will provide program management and enrichment by providing a pilot project program, workshops, a seminar series, training and educational opportunities for new investigators and more experienced investigators moving into muscle research. The Mechanics and Devices Core (B) will provide state of the art measurements of muscle biomechanics at multiple levels of integration, and develop new assays for maturation and assessment of early stage muscle. The Metabolism and Energetics Core (C) will provide tools for in depth measures and analysis of metabolomics, energetics, cell respiration and mitochondrial function. The Computational and Quantitative Analysis Core (D) will provide computational and statistical tools for understanding disease, suggesting new therapeutic targets and understanding mechanisms. The CTMR will offer an environment to facilitate using integrative analysis, from single molecule dynamics through muscle structure-function relationships, with interdisciplinary approaches to advance skeletal muscle disease research and therapeutics development.

PROJECT NARRATIVE - Overall Skeletal muscle dysfunction represent a significant and growing public health concern due to reduced quality of life and loss of independence for those affected. Muscle dysfunction and degeneration result from numerous pathological conditions including genetic diseases like muscular dystrophy and systems level conditions like diabetes, cancer and aging. The proposed UW Resource Center for Translational Muscle Research (CTMR) will provide access to, and training on state of the art tools to recruit new investigators, accelerate research and disseminate news of exciting new successes in understanding and treating skeletal muscle dysfunction to improve the health status of the U.S. population.