We’re pleased to share that the NIGMS National and Regional Resource Program (R24) funding opportunity announcement (FOA) has been reissued (PAR-22-065). This program began in 2019 to provide access to state-of-the-art facilities, equipment, technologies, research tools, and software that aren’t generally available to a large number of researchers. To date, the program has established 12 resources that serve the scientific community on a national or multistate regional basis and offer a breadth of technologies. Below, we highlight just a few. We encourage you to explore all of the resources made available through this program and to learn more about the new FOA on our National and Regional Resources webpage.
- National High-Throughput Crystallization Center (HTX)
Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, University of Buffalo
This center provides robotic instrumentation, advanced imaging technologies, and expertise in biomolecular crystallography for high-throughput crystallization. It supports scientific efforts, both on COVID-19-related projects and the crystallization of other targets. Once crystallization trials are initiated, they are automatically monitored for 6 weeks and users can access the results as they are recorded through the new crystal hunting software, MARCO Polo! NIH and the National Science Foundation subsidize academic, government, and nonprofit organizations with a fee-for-service of $400 per experimental screen of over 1,500 conditions; industrial users can also access this resource. Users are provided with all images, metadata, and software to review their crystallization screening results. The center also supports additional experimental platforms and computational tools for crystallization experiments with the goal to expand these technologies for broader use. - National Resource for Mechanistic Modeling of Cellular Systems
University of Connecticut Health Center
This resource supports further improvement and dissemination of Virtual Cell (VCell) and Complex Pathway Simulator (COPASI) software platforms, which are comprehensive and widely used tools for computational modeling of the biophysical mechanisms controlling cell function. Both platforms are open-source tools for a wide range of scientists, from experimental cell biologists to theoretical biophysicists and chemists. VCell and COPASI each boast thousands of active users. In efforts to continually expand the reach of these tools to a broader research community, resource staff offer hands-on training at the annual Computational Cell Biology Workshop. The next online workshop will be hosted May 23-25, 2022, with Drs. Aurélie Carlier, Padmini Rangamani, and Melanie Stefan as guest speakers. An in-person event is planned for July 25-27, 2022. - IDeA National Resource for Quantitative Proteomics
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
This resource provides service, outreach, and educational opportunities in advanced quantitative proteomics to researchers in the 23 IDeA states and Puerto Rico and to other NIGMS investigators across the nation. It features a competitive voucher program that offers fully subsidized access at no cost, providing investigators with pilot data to create new hypotheses, or support publications and ongoing research studies. The resource user base expanded significantly during its first year, with more than 3,300 samples processed. The resource is now working with Google and NIH’s Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative to shift the proteomics data analysis pipeline to the cloud. This expanded capability will include automated data analysis, delivery, consulting, and cloud-based data storage.