Many thanks to all of you in the CGRB community for your enthusiastic response to our Illumina seed funding competition, made possible by Illumina’s generous contribution of sequencing reagents. We received 36 applications, many of them very strong, and so we were not able fund more than a small fraction. The applications were judged on the basis of novelty, impact, feasibility, collaboration, and support for a grant proposal.

We funded the following proposals:

“Molecular analysis of diet and genotype in endangered wildlife by sequencing of scat DNA”. Taal Levy (Assistant Professor, Fisheries and Wildlife) $5607

“Profiling gene expression and symbiont communities to understand variation in corals’ capacity for thermal acclimation” Eli Meyer, (Assistant Professor, Integrative Biology); Jay R. Reichman, (Assistant Professor, Botany & Plant Pathology) $6054

“Sequencing the Genome of the Symbiotic Chlorophyte Elliptochloris marina” Jack Koch, (Graduate Student, Integrative Biology; SSIMBIO group)  $3,141.

“Who’s my maker: Deciphering cyanobacterial metagenomics to determine the true producers of bioactive natural products” Benjamin Philmus (Assistant Professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences) $2201.

“Characterizing whole transcriptome changes during the transition to the persistent form by the obligate pathogen, Chlamydia trachomatis” Daniel Rockey (Professor, Biomedical Sciences; Jeff Chang, Associate Professor, Botany and Plant Pathology) $4,920.

Brett Tyler
Director
Center for Genome Research & Biocomputing