NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The National Science Foundation has earmarked $6 million in fiscal 2018 to fund research projects under its Enabling Discovery through Genomic Tools (EDGE) program.
EDGE was established to support the development of functional genomic tools and techniques for genome manipulation in model organisms. Earlier this year, the NSF issued $14 million in the first round of EDGE funding, which included nearly $10 million in grants to researchers working in birds, plants, arthropods, and fish, among other organisms.
The NSF said that it now plans to award $6 million in fiscal 2018 to fund approximately 10 new EDGE projects developing "functional genomic tools and infrastructure to enable direct tests of hypotheses about gene function in diverse organisms for which such tools and infrastructure are presently lacking."
Areas of interest under the EDGE program include innovative approaches for establishing gene function; the development and testing of transformation approaches; expansion of the use of gene editing, knock-out, and overexpression approaches in diverse organisms; and the development of approaches to test gene function in a variety of targeted, single cells in organisms.
The NSF noted that EDGE is not intended to support projects focused on developing a wide array of tools and resources as a way to establish new canonical model organisms.
Additional details about the funding opportunity can be found here.