Not as busy as I'd like to be

I had expected to spend the first half of September frantically polishing our latest resubmission of our  grant proposal on DNA uptake by Haemophilus influenzae.  But I missed a pre-registration deadline, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) offers no recourse.

Applicants are supposed to register their pending proposals a month in advance, including a one-page summary of the proposal and suggestions for the appropriate review panel.  In the past I've always done this at the same time I signed up to have a draft of the proposal go through the internal review process my university offers.  But this time around I didn't think it needed another round of internal review - the writing and presentation is already very good, and the only weakness the reviewers found was in the proposed experiments.  So I didn't sign up for internal review, and didn't remember the pre-registration step (due August 15) until earlier this week, when I went online to start working on revisions to the budget. 

I've now spoken to our Research Services office, to a CIHR administration, to a local colleague with lots of CIHR administration expertise,a nd to a distant colleague who made the same mistake for a previous deadline.  All agree that there's no recourse - I'll have to wait until the March 1 2012 deadline.

Well, this gives us plenty of time to generate the new preliminary data that will address the reviewer's request that we use point-mutation mutagenesis to analyze the functions of competence genes.