A draft NIH proposal

With the US variation manuscript in the hands of my co-authors, I've spent the past week working on our planned proposal to NIH. It's not due till the beginning of February, but I have some internal reviewers lined up and I promised I'd get them a presentable draft by today. Which I will - this morning I just have to tidy up the last bit (how we'll characterize the transformability QTLs we hope to find) and polish a couple of paragraphs. (Note that this is far in advance of my usual grant-writing schedule - feels good).

We have three Specific Aims: 1. Characterize recombination tracts in individual transformants. 2. Measure recombination efficiencies across the genome, in pooled transformant genomes. 3. Identify loci responsible for transformability differences.

There's still lots of work to be done once I hear back from the reviewers (hopefully in a couple of weeks). The Methods aren't yet as good as they can be (assuming the goals don't change, which they might). The preliminary sequence data needs more analyzing and there are a couple of preliminary experiments we really need to do. The 'grantsmanship' needs LOTS of work (more selling of us, more potential problems and fallbacks). There aren't any references yet. The writing still needs work, but not until after the content is improved.

And I've done nothing about the other parts of the proposal (Budget etc).

In the meantime, my co-authors have sent me their revised draft of the US variation manuscript...