Peroxisome proliferator activated receptors (PPAR's) are ligand activated transcription factors which have a pleiotropic role in many physiological processes. PPARγ is the molecular target of the thiazolidinediones class of drugs which are used to treat patients with non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM). Endothelial dysfunction, which develops in patients that are diabetic or chronically hypertensive, is thought to contribute to the progression of carotid artery disease, cerebral vascular dysfunction and stroke. PPARγ is expressed in vascular endothelium and smooth muscle and therefore is a potentially important factor in the regulation of vascular function and blood pressure. PPARγ has been reported to inhibit responses to vasoconstrictors such as endothelin, stimulate the release of vasodilators, and increase expression of CuZn-SOD in vascular muscle and endothelium. Importantly, patients carrying dominant negative mutations in PPARγ exhibit early onset type II diabetes and hypertension. Current data suggests that PPARγ exerts a protective effect in the vessel wall and we hypothesize that PPARγ plays an important role in the regulation of vascular function and blood pressure. We are currently testing this hypothesis using a variety of genetic, computational and Bioinformatic tools. We are: 1) using adenoviruses over-expressing wildtype and dominant negative mutations of PPARγ in blood vessels from normotensive and hypertensive mice to test whether they can alter endothelial function, 2) developing novel transgenic mice with expression of the wild-type and dominant negative mutants of PPARγ targeted specifically to vascular muscle and endothelial cells using cell-specific promoters, 3) using microarrays to determine the transcriptional targets of PPARγ, and 4) using computational and Bioinformatic tools to scan genomic sequences for PPARγ response elements (PPRE).