NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health expects to award $43 million in 2014 to help research centers buy new or upgrade existing instruments for use in genomics, mass spectrometry, imaging, microscopy, and a range of other biomedical research areas.
The funding from NIH's Shared Instrumentation program will support the purchase or upgrading of expensive instruments through roughly 85 new awards.
These grants will provide funding of at least $100,000 and up to $600,000, although there is no limit on the total cost of the instruments the grants are used to buy.
The program, run by NIH's Office of Research Infrastructure Programs, was created to make it possible for institutions to buy expensive research tools that are necessary for NIH-funded biomedical science projects but which can only be justified on a shared-use basis.
Institutes may use these awards to help them buy instruments such as DNA and protein sequencers, mass spectrometers, electron and confocal microscopes, biosensors, cell sorters, and x-ray diffractometers.
NIH also will consider applications for stand-alone computer clusters and storage systems, but only if the instruments are solely dedicated to the research needs of a broad community of NIH-funded researchers.
NIH plans to begin accepting applications for the Shared Instrumentation Award grants in February 2013.