The Menzies Research Institute's week of funding success continues with two grants announced today from the Australian Research Council totalling $690,000.

The Menzies Research Institute's week of funding success continues with two grants announced today from the Australian Research Council totalling $690,000.

A new project will investigate blood flow routes in muscle through a grant of $390,000 over three years.

Associate Professor Steve Rattigan said that the Australian population is ageing and the proportion of the population over the age of 65 is expected to reach 22% by the year 2030.

"The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in this older population is thought to be around 20%, compared to around 6% in younger populations. An initial cause of type 2 diabetes may be dysfunction of the very small blood vessels in muscle which is brought on by low levels of physical activity.

"This new project addresses the concepts of microvascular function and microvascular fitness by using the latest technology to map blood flow routes in muscle under a number of relevant situations," Associate Professor Rattigan said.

The University of Tasmania, in partnership with the CSIRO, was also awarded $300,000 through a Linkage Infrastructure grant for the establishment of a confocal/multiphoton microscope for imaging of living systems.

Professor James Vickers said that the grant will provide a facility to allow scientists to study the dynamic changes in living systems.

"With this new infrastructure we will be able to examine the smallest unicellular organisms in the ocean through to the sophisticated neural networks of the living brain.

"Not only will this imaging facility allow us to understand how living systems work, we will also be able to explore the dynamic changes that underlie human disease and injury," he said.

Today's grant announcements follow the news yesterday that Menzies was awarded almost $12 million in research grants by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

In a first for the University of Tasmania, the NHMRC funding includes $8.1 million for a prestigious program grant that will help researchers better understand diseases like prostate cancer, leukaemia, MS, malaria and epilepsy.

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