NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health will grant roughly $43 million in fiscal year 2011 for its Shared Instrument Grant program, which provides funds to institutions seeking to buy expensive biomedical research equipment.
The program, administered by the National Center for Research Resources, will support the purchase of instruments and tools costing at least $100,000 and as much as $600,000, including tools such as DNA sequencers, mass spectrometers, cell sorters, biosensors, confocal and electron microscopes, X-ray diffraction systems, and NMR spectrometers.
The program gives funding to universities, non-profit organizations, private institutions, colleges, or hospitals.
The SIG's objective is to help these institutes acquire expensive research instruments that can only be justified on a shared-use basis and which will be used in meritorious NIH-funded, basic, translational, or clinical research.
It will fund the purchase of or upgrade to a single expensive, specialized, commercially available instrument or an integrated instrument system, such as one in which the components, when used in conjunction with one another, perform a function that no single component could provide.
Although the central aim of the SIG program is to buy tools such as DNA sequencers, mass spectrometers, and other biological and biomedical research tools, some information technologies such as computer systems, supercomputers, clusters, and storage systems may be applicable for funding if the tools are solely dedicated to the research needs of a broad community of NIH-supported investigators.