NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - The National Science Foundation plans to award $20 million per year for bioinformatics research projects over the next three years, according to a program solicitation that NSF released last week.
The NSF's Advances in Biological Informatics program will award approximately $20 million per year to between 20 and 25 projects that "encourage new approaches to the analysis and dissemination of biological knowledge for the benefit of both the scientific community and the broader public," the agency said in the solicitation.
The ABI program is "especially interested in the development of informatics tools and resources that have the potential to advance, or transform, research in biology supported by the Directorate for Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation," NSF said.
NSF said the program encourages research in the following areas:
- New data types, algorithms, and methods for understanding complexity in biological systems across multiple scales of organization from molecules to ecosystems;
- Algorithms, software, or ontologies "related to the retrieval, integration, and use of heterogeneous biological information;"
- Tools that can facilitate biological research workflows, analytic pathways, or integration between the field and the laboratory, or between observation, experiments, and models;
- Software and methods that use new technologies for acquiring, communicating, or visualizing biological data;
- New methods and tools for developing and using biological databases, "including research into database architectures and infrastructures, data standards designed to be extendable to different biological domains, and data structures for new types of biological information;" and
- Informatics tools and approaches that bridge "interdisciplinary differences in concepts and data" between biology and other sciences.
Proposals are due the second Tuesday in August through 2010.