NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - The National Institutes of Health is soliciting high-throughput screening assay applications from public or private investigators who are interested in working with the NIH Roadmap-funded Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network.
NIH on Friday issued two solicitations under its Molecular Libraries and Imaging Roadmap Initiative with the goal of developing chemical probes for the MLPCN, a collaborative research network that follows on the Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network that NIH created in 2005.
NIH said that as of July 1, 2008, the MLSCN will become the MLPCN “with the emphasis on probe discovery and development.”
The MLPCN is expected to perform more than 100 biochemical or cell-based assays solicited from the scientific community against a library of more than 300,000 compounds, NIH said.
The centers will develop expertise and skills in assay development, assay adaptation and implementation, high-throughput screening, informatics, structure-activity relationship analysis, cheminformatics, and chemistry.
On Friday, NIH released two solicitations for assays that will be implemented in the MLPCN. One uses the R03 small research grant mechanism and the other is under the X01 resource access mechanism.
Under the R03 solicitation, budgets for total costs are limited to $25,000 for each award and the project period is limited to one year with a one-year no-cost extension.
Under the X01 solicitation, NIH said it will support “the costs of assay automation, screening and optimization chemistry.”
NIH said the program is aimed at developing new chemical probes as research tools to advance the understanding of biological functions and disease mechanisms.