Implementing Research Shared (Core) Facility Billing Systems.

Research Shared (core) Facilities (RSF) operate as centers of expertise and help to accelerate basic and translational science. A centralized platform for unified ordering, equipment reservation, and the billing of services using an integrated software system is a valuable resource that many academic institutions should consider. This paper discusses considerations for best practices and identifies lessons learned from the implementation of two different software systems for RSF.

Parental perspectives on research for Down syndrome.

Background: Down syndrome is the most common genetic disorder associated with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Research to improve health care outcomes in Down syndrome lags significantly behind other disease categories. Among these reasons are funding, recruitment and availability of research studies being conducted.

Separation by cell size enriches for mammary stem cell repopulation activity.

Mammary gland reconstitution experiments, as well as lineage tracing experiments, have provided evidence for the existence of adult mammary stem cells (MaSCs). In addition, cell sorting techniques for specific cell surface markers (CD24(+)CD29(H)CD49f(H)Sca1(-)) have been used to prospectively isolate MaSC-enriched populations. Although these markers enrich for cell subpopulations that harbor MaSCs, they do not identify regenerative stem cells uniquely.