Exploratory Research
[Closed]
Timeline
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Call opens
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Deadline for submitting proposals
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Award decisions made
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Projects active until September 30, 2021
Projects will be active until September 30, 2021.
EMSL’s Call for Exploratory Research proposals is for small-scale research projects in areas relevant to EMSL’s biological and environmental science areas. This year’s call is targeted toward research by the following groups of individuals:
- DOE Early Career Award winners with at least one year remaining on their grants
- Select PIs who submitted proposals to the Call for FY2021 Large-Scale EMSL Research (LSR) and received a score of 4.0 or higher but were not accepted due to unavailable resources
- Select PIs who submitted proposals to the Call for FY2021 Large-Scale EMSL Research (LSR) and received a formal recommendation by the Proposal Review Panel to revise and resubmit to this year’s Exploratory call. A formal recommendation to resubmit would have been included in the LSR decision letter to the PI. PIs in this group must follow the guidance for resubmission.
Highly successful proposals are those that include well-described research plans, which have been developed with input from our Capability Leads and can be completed within the fiscal year.
Focus topic areas
Functional and Systems Biology Area
- Characterize the dynamics of cellular localization, subunit stoichiometry and structure of protein complexes
- Determine the functions of conserved but uncharacterized genes that aid in developing and improving predictive models of plant, fungal and microbial growth, performance, and composition as a function of genotype and environment
- Computational studies aimed at 1) mechanistic understanding of enzyme active site chemistry or 2) data-centric computing approaches to integrate multi-omic datasets into biochemical pathway or cellular models.
Environmental Transformations and Interactions Area
- Experimental investigation and/or computational simulation of biogeochemical processes that control exchange of biocritical nutrients (or contaminants) between terrestrial watershed and/or coastal aquatic surface and subsurface interfaces.
- Experimental investigation and/or computational simulation of the interplay and feedbacks between plant, microbial (bacteria, fungi) and/or viral communities and their response to nutrient (C, N, P, or micronutrient, etc.) limitation, drought, water quality, temperature, and CO2 stressors.
- Experimental characterization and/or application of computational methods to understand the physical, chemical and optical properties and/or cloud nucleating potential of atmospheric aerosols collected from ARM and ASR field campaigns.
Highlighted Capabilities
Applicants should consider emerging cutting-edge capabilities that are available to users who coordinate their proposals with the EMSL scientists leading their development. The capabilities include but are not limited to the following:
- Stable isotope probing and analysis platform that includes labeled CO2plant growth facilities, NMR, IRMS, and NanoSIMS (Contact: Jim Moran, Mary Lipton, or Pubudu Handakumbura)
- Transcriptomics and proteomics from single or a small number of cells detected and isolated by flow cytometry, fluorescence microscopy and/or laser capture micro-dissection and enabled by microfluidics and nanoPOTS (Contact: Galya Orr or Ying Zhu)
- New structural biology approaches combining cell-free expression and native mass spectrometry capabilities for characterization of protein complexes (Contact: Irina Novikova or Mowei Zhou)
- New Krios cryoTEM for atomic resolution structural analysis of protein complexes, organelles, whole cells and small molecule crystals (Contact: Trevor Moser or James Evans)
- New Aquilos cryo-FIB/SEM for site-selective sample preparation for cryo-EM, correlative light and electron microscopy or serial section slice-and-view 3D imaging of large tissue or plant/microbe interactions (Contact: Trevor Moser or James Evans)
- Soft X-ray nanotomography system for 3D nanoscale imaging of cells and biological materials (Contact: James Evans or Scott Lea)
- High-resolution micro-X-ray computed tomography system for characterization of plant root architecture and soil pore structure (Contact: Tamas Varga or Mark Bowden)
- Noninvasive optical coherence tomography (OCT) for in situ, 3D imaging of living tissues, which can be applied to static samples or deployed in various growth chambers to provide timeseries imaging of plant or other systems. (Contact: Curtis Larimer or Jim Moran)
- Interactive data visualization tools that support exploration of complex natural organic matter or proteomics data and comparison of data across treatment groups (Contact: Allison Thompson)
- Tahoma, BER’s new heterogeneous computing system for highly parallel modeling/simulation and data processing needs. Tahoma is a combination of 160 CPU nodes and 24 GPU nodes, with an estimated peak performance of 0.57 PetaFLOPs. This system will support computational research requiring significant memory (384 or 1536 GByte per node RAM) as well as processing speed to enable data mining, image processing, and multiscale modeling. (Contact: Lee Ann McCue).
Other capabilities that offer opportunities for novel and exciting experimental data include a variety of in-situ probes for NMR, advanced electron microscopy in a specialized “quiet” facility, high-resolution mass spectrometry including a 21 Tesla FTICR, and Atom Probe Tomography. Details about each of these are available on the EMSL capabilities web page.
If you are unsure what instruments would be best for your project, you can search instruments by research platform of interest.
For general inquiries
Terry Law, terry.law@pnnl.gov
How to submit a proposal
Follow the steps below to submit your proposal.
