The National Institutes of Health, NIA-IRP intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Microbiology and Immunology for a project titled "Hypermutation of Shark Immunoglobulins". The University will immunize sharks, collect peripheral blood lymphocytes, and analyze DNA for hypermutation. This will involve several molecular biology techniques to examine various immunoglobulin genes for mutations. The presence of uracils, an intermediate in mutation, can be detected by ligation-mediated PCR and analyzed by gels. If the gel results look promising, the results can be confirmed by the DNA sequencing.

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