As NIH Director Francis Collins recently noted on his blog, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the first experiment demonstrating that X-rays are diffracted by crystals. Two years later, this discovery was recognized with a Nobel Prize in physics. For this and other reasons, the United Nations has designated 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography. The designation offers an opportunity for organizations worldwide to increase public awareness of the field and promote access to crystallographic knowledge and activities.

X-ray crystallography is central to many areas of basic biomedical research, and NIGMS supports a number of major crystallographic efforts that may be of interest and use to you.

Since 2000, our Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) has undertaken the high-throughput determination of protein structures by crystallography and NMR methods, resulting in the deposition in the public Protein Data Bank of more than 5,000 macromolecular structures. The initiative’s current phase focuses on the determination of biologically relevant and important structures. Members of the scientific community can nominate proteins for structure determination, order protein plasmids and empty vectors, and access PSI data and other resources. Active PSI funding opportunities solicit applications for Technology Development for High-Throughput Structural Biology Research (R01) and Technology Development for Protein Modeling (R01).

We also have been involved in supporting the construction, upgrade and maintenance of synchrotron beamline stations for X-ray crystallographic studies. These activities include a state-of-the-art facility at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, which we established in partnership with the National Cancer Institute. Our support of synchrotron facilities and of crystallographic technology development has improved access for NIH grantees and other users and increased the capacity for crystallographic data collection.

In addition, we now oversee the Biomedical Technology Research Centers, several of which focus on developing and applying innovative crystallography techniques. These resource centers provide broad access to instruments, methods, software, expertise and hands-on training.

I look forward to sharing more details about the International Year of Crystallography as activities get under way.

NIH offers a wide variety of career development (K) awards, and NIGMS participates in a number of them. Here are answers to questions we often get about NIGMS support of these awards. Which career development awards (K awards) does NIGMS support? We support:

• Mentored Clinical Career Development Awards (K08, K23) in clinical research areas funded by NIGMS, which include anesthesiology, clinical pharmacology, sepsis, innate immunity and inflammation, and trauma and burn injury.
• Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Awards (K25) for quantitatively trained investigators who make a commitment to basic or clinical biomedical, bioengineering, bioimaging or behavioral research that is relevant to the NIGMS mission.
• Pathway to Independence Awards (K99/R00) for promising postdoctoral scientists to receive both mentored and independent research support in areas relevant to NIGMS.
• Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA) (K12) that combine a traditional mentored postdoctoral research experience at a research intensive institution with an opportunity to develop academic skills, including teaching, at partner institutions with a demonstrated commitment to students from groups underrepresented in biomedical and behavioral research.

I’ve found a new funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for a K award. How can I tell if NIGMS participates in this FOA? If NIGMS is participating, it will be listed in the “Components of Participating Organizations” section near the top of the FOA. If NIGMS is not participating, consider whether another listed component may be appropriate for your application. Where can I learn more about NIGMS-supported K awards? Visit our Mentored Career Development Awards page to find additional information about most of our K awards. You also can contact an NIGMS program director in your area of interest. Where can I find information on all NIH K awards? You can find information on these awards at the K Kiosk. Another NIH resource, the Career Award Wizard, can help you identify the K awards that may be right for you.

NIH offers two tools that can help you search for projects similar to the one you’re thinking about. In this post, I’ll take you on a quick tour of the NIH RePORTER tool, a repository of information about NIH-funded research projects, and show you how to find information that may be useful to know before you start writing a grant application. A future Feedback Loop post will cover the thesaurus-based search tool called Like This. Main Query Form From RePORTER’s Main Query Form, you can search by principal investigator name, project number, organization, text term(s) and many other criteria. If you want to know which NIH institutes or centers fund projects like yours, or which study section would be most appropriate to review your application, then searching by text term(s) would probably be the best approach. To find projects in a particular research area, you may start with the “Advanced” text query option, which allows for complex queries using the Boolean operators “and,” “or,” and “not” along with parentheses for nesting phrases. The example below searches for projects on telomeres and their relationship to cancer using wildcards (%) and synonyms to encompass variations such as telomere, telomerase, neoplasm, neoplastic, etc. TIP: One way to limit the number of search results is to use the Funding Mechanism field on the Main Query Form to select the mechanism(s) most relevant to your particular search (e.g., “Research Project Grants” or “Training, Individual”). If you already have a funding mechanism in mind, you can type R01, R21, F33, etc., into that part of the Project Number field. Once you have entered your search and submitted the query, you’ll get a Project Search Results page, which displays the grant number, project title, principal investigator’s name and organization, NIH funding institute or center, and fiscal year total cost. Project Information Details Page To get specific information about a particular project listed on the Project Search Results page, click on its Project number (e.g., GM066228). You’ll get the Project Information Details page that lists the grant’s program official with contact information, the study section that reviewed the application, and the funding opportunity announcement (FOA) to which the application responded. By viewing the details of projects most relevant to yours, you can begin to get a sense of which program director(s) to contact to discuss your potential application, which study sections review applications like yours, and whether applications in this area typically respond to a parent FOA or a special initiative. Other Project Information Page Tabs From the Project Information Details page, you can use the tabs near the top to get to pages with other information relevant to your search. For example, the Description tab takes you to the grant abstract. Reading these can help you become familiar with other funded projects in your interest area and help you identify and highlight what’s unique about your proposal. The Similar Projects and Nearby Projects tabs offer additional ways to find grants related to your search term and to find potential collaborators. TIP: To refine your original search term on the Main Query Form, use the results from the Similar Projects tab to identify alternative phrases in project titles and abstracts that can increase the effectiveness of your text search. Data & Visualize Tab Another feature, available from the Project Search Results page, is a tab called Data & Visualize. This provides a graph of the NIH institutes or centers that administer research in that area and their levels of support. The table next to the bar chart lets you drill down to see projects by funding component. Comments Welcome I hope this sampling has introduced you to some useful ways of exploring the NIH-funded research portfolio. We continue to make RePORTER faster, easier to use, and more informative, and we welcome your comments and suggestions, including topics for other RePORTER tutorials. Send them to RePORT@mail.nih.gov or directly to me at onkenj@od.nih.gov.

Last Friday, we hosted Cell Day--an extremely exciting online interactive chat about the cell. During the event, many members of our scientific staff, including our Acting Director, Judith Greenberg, fielded more than 140 questions from mostly 5th through 12th grade students and teachers across the country.

We anticipated some of the questions we’d be asked, but many surprised and impressed us. Some questions got us thinking about how we know what we know and let us share why we became scientists. Here are a few examples:

• Do my cells think?
• Which living organism has the most cells?
• Why have plants not evolved to be black in color in order to maximize light absorption?
• What inspired you to take an interest in biology and its beautiful diversity?

Read the transcript to view more questions and our answers.

While Cell Day was developed as an NIGMS 50th anniversary activity, we enjoyed it so much that we plan to do it again next year as part of our continued commitment to science education.

Study sections review applications three times a year, about halfway between the submission date and the second level of review by an advisory council. We are currently in the midst of the review cycle for the January 2013 Council meeting, which means that applicants will be getting their summary statements soon. A recent post described a new NIH resource to explain the next steps after the review of your application. One of them is to contact your program director to discuss the critique, and I highly encourage this. Program directors read hundreds of summary statements each year, so we have a good idea about the comments that might have influenced your score, the likelihood that your application will be funded, and the types of revisions that might make your application more competitive. If you’d like this input from your program director, the best first step is to send an e-mail to him or her after the summary statement is released (typically a few weeks after the study section has met to review your application) to arrange a time to talk. Program directors usually gain access to the summary statement around the same time you do, but giving us a chance to read and think about your review can facilitate a useful and productive conversation. In addition to helping you determine next steps for your application, the conversation offers an opportunity to foster a relationship with the program director who manages grants in your area of research.

I previously described our effort to solicit feedback from investigators on their needs and ideas for outsourcing laboratory procedures. Now I’d like to share a summary of the overall results (no longer available) and some observations based on the 35 responses we received (mostly from academia):

• Unexpectedly, almost all of the services mentioned by respondents constitute technologies or methodologies currently available for outsourcing. The most frequently identified ones—next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics/statistics and mass spectroscopy—are offered as services by numerous companies and core facilities.

• Several marketplace-type platforms have recently been launched that facilitate bringing together researchers and providers of desired laboratory expertise, technology and research services. For a short list, see the news articles included in this post.

• Evaluating the quality and cost of procedures available for outsourcing is not always straightforward. Similarly, assessing a laboratory’s actual costs for specific procedures, some of which could be outsourced, is difficult. Performing such economic analyses could reveal new needs for outsourcing laboratory procedures.

While we realize that the feedback we received may not be representative of the whole community, the results lead us to conclude that there does not appear to be a need for a special initiative to develop novel outsourcing capabilities.

To help increase student interest in cell biology and research careers—as well as to mark our 50th anniversary—we’re hosting an online interactive chat about the cell on Friday, November 2. Middle and high school students, teachers and interested members of the public can submit questions to be answered by NIGMS scientific staff from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. EDT. The “Cell Day” Web site includes registration information and classroom resources. You can view the chat live or read the transcript, which we plan to post shortly after the chat ends. And please help us get the word out by letting people in your local schools and community know about Cell Day. This event is just one example of the Institute’s commitment to science education and to encouraging future generations of scientists via formal research training and informal learning opportunities.

To address questions that investigators frequently ask about the review of their applications and the next steps after review, NIH recently created an online resource, titled Next Steps. It has also added a link to this new Web site on summary statements, just below the impact score and percentile. Questions include:

• What does the score mean?
• When and how will I know if my application will be funded?, and
• When can an application no longer be resubmitted?

The FAQs do not cover all scenarios, but they do provide the basis for discussion with your program director. NIGMS information on summary statements and just-in-time actions is posted for research grant, fellowship and training and workforce development applications.

The National Research Council of the National Academies has released a report titled Transforming Glycoscience: A Roadmap for the Future. The report was sponsored by several NIH institutes, including NIGMS, along with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. It was prepared by the Committee on Assessing the Importance and Impact of Glycomics and Glycosciences, chaired by David Walt of Tufts University. The committee was charged to “articulate a unified vision for the field on glycoscience and glycomics” and to “develop a roadmap with concrete research goals to significantly advance [them].” Their major recommendations are that NIH, NSF, DOE and other relevant stakeholders place a high priority on the development of:

• Transformative methods for the facile synthesis of carbohydrates and glycoconjuates;
• Transformative tools for the detection, imaging, separation and high-resolution structure determination of carbohydrate structures and mixtures; and
• Transformative capabilities for perturbing carbohydrate and glycoconjugate structure, recognition, metabolism and biosynthesis.

The report also supports the development of:

• Robust, validated informatics tools to enable accurate carbohydrate and glycoconjugate structural prediction, computational modeling and data mining. This capability will broaden access of glycoscience data to the entire scientific community.
• A long-term-funded, stable, integrated, centralized database that includes mammalian, plant and microbial carbohydrates and glycoconjugates and has links to other databases. The deposition of new structures using a reporting standard should be required.
• Integration of the glycosciences into the science curriculum.

While NIGMS has a long history of investment in the glycosciences, including funding for the Consortium for Functional Glycomics glue grant and the development of methods and tools required for a full glycomics effort, the report sets an ambitious pace that would require a broad, multidisciplinary, multi-agency effort. It’s possible that the report may help guide the development of future NIH initiatives in the areas identified. Gerald Hart, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the committee that prepared the report, will brief the NIGMS Advisory Council of its findings at its September meeting. NAS staff involved in developing the report will also be in attendance to respond to questions.

Roughly two-thirds of the biomedical technology research and development programs formerly in the National Center for Research Resources are now part of NIGMS. Housed in the Biomedical Technology Branch of our Division of Biomedical Technology, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology, the programs meet the needs of biomedical researchers by supporting cutting-edge research and development activities through a variety of award mechanisms. In this post, I will focus on the Biomedical Technology Research Centers (BTRC) program, which supports the development and advancement of technologies needed to address today’s compelling biomedical research questions. The 65 national resource centers—34 are funded by NIGMS and 31 by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering—are available to scientists doing basic, translational and clinical biomedical research, providing them access to instruments, methods, software, expertise and hands-on training. With priority given to NIH-funded investigators, scientists have the opportunity to work closely and collaboratively with experts at the centers to:

• Adapt BTRC tools to further the specific aims of their projects.
• Contribute to the generation of pioneering technologies that can open up new research paths.

The BTRC program has been developing and providing access to state-of-the-art resources for 50 years, and it is directly responsible for such milestone innovations as:

• The introduction of the computer into the laboratory setting.
• The evolution of magnetic spin resonance from an observed scientific phenomenon to an analytical research tool to a clinical imaging technique.
• The development of technologies for harnessing synchrotron radiation for biomedical research.
• The creation of informatics approaches that allow for secure access to and sharing of huge volumes of dissimilar data.

At the half-century mark, the BTRC program remains vital and responsive to the scientific community. Ongoing centers continue to evolve and create innovative technologies, while new centers form as needs emerge. We encourage you to take advantage of these valuable research resources. For more information about the NIGMS-funded BTRCs or other biomedical technology programs, please feel free to call 301-435-0755 or e-mail one of the following program directors:

• Fred Friedman
• Doug Sheeley
• Amy Swain
• Mary Ann Wu