NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has awarded £10 million ($16.4 million) to universities around the country to fund the purchase of big-ticket life sciences research equipment, including genomics, proteomics, and advanced microscopy technologies.
BBSRC said today that the 20 new awards, funded under the Advanced Life Sciences Research Technology (ALERT13) initiative, represent the first major equipment purchasing program the council has funded since 2007.
The technologies the grants will purchase will be used as shared resources for scientific collaborations and to benefit industry and public-sector based research projects, BBSRC said.
Among the ALERT13 grants, the University of Liverpool was awarded nearly £354,000 to establish single-molecule real-time sequencing to support projects in the north of the UK, as well as £213,000 to purchase mass spectrometry imaging technologies.
The University of Bristol received a £326,000 award to buy an Affymetrix GeneTitan to support high-throughput genotyping.
The University of Sheffield was awarded £224,000 to buy a quantitative biomolecular interaction suite, the University of Leeds received £409,000 for a high-throughput, low-volume crystallization facility, and the University of Manchester received £499,000 to fund hydrogen/deuterium Exchange and ion mobility mass spectrometry tools for use in protein interaction studies.
The full list of awards can be found here.