Like Mendel and his peas, the University of Arizona's biotechnology institute has been busy planting grant "seeds" among hybrid research teams on campus in order to cultivate future generations of federal grant money and interdisciplinary partnerships.

Seven cross-college research teams each received $50,000 seed grants from the UA's Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology, or IBSB, according to Arizona Daily Star. The teams will spend the money over the next year to study everything from nanotech devices able to lasso cancer cells from the blood stream, to DNA-powered electrical transistors.

Initially, IBSB had slated four such intra-university grants for this funding cycle, but the number of promising proposals warranted giving out an additional three grants, IBSB Director Vicki Chandler told the Star.

Among the 32 applications IBSB received, 43 departments from seven colleges at UA were represented. Such a cornucopia of disciplines is a great indicator that faculty are eager to collaborate with their cross-campus colleagues to achieve big goals, such as federal research grants for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

"This really and truly is seed money, in that it gives them the preliminary data that allows them to be competitive nationally," Chandler told the Star.

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For more information:

"Grants go to UA team research," Arizona Daily Star, 07/22/2004