I’m pleased to announce that a paper that I contributed to was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Animal Science!
“Feed efficiency phenotypes in lambs involve changes in ruminal, colonic, and small intestine-located microbiota”, Katheryn Perea; Katharine Perz; Sarah Olivo; Andrew Williams; Medora Lachman; Suzanne Ishaq; Jennifer Thomson; Carl Yeoman (article here).
Katheryn is an undergraduate at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who received an INBRE grant to support her as a visiting researcher at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT over summer 2016. Here, she worked with Drs. Carl Yeoman and Jennifer Thomson to perform the diversity analysis on the bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract of sheep from a previous study. These sheep had been designated as efficient or inefficient, based on how much feed was needed for them to grow. Efficient sheep were able to grow more with less feed, and it was thought this might be due to hosting different symbiotic bacteria which were better at fermenting fibrous plant material into usable byproducts for the sheep.
Samples from the sheep were collected as part of a larger study on feed efficiency performed by MSU graduate students Kate Perz and Medora Lachman, as well as technicians Sarah Olivo and Andrew Williams, and Katheryn performed the data and statistical analysis using some of my guidelines. This is Katheryn’s first published article, and one I just presented a poster on at the Congress on Gastrointestinal Function in Chicago, IL!
I just got back from my very first Congress on Gastrointestinal Function, a small meeting for researchers with a specific focus on the gastrointestinal tract, which is held every two years in Chicago, Illinois. The special session this year was on “Early Acquisition and Development of the Gut Microbiota: A Comparative Analysis”. The rest of the sessions opened up the broader topics of gut ecosystem surveillance and modulation, as well as new techniques and products with which to study the effect of microorganisms on hosts and vice versa. The research had a strong livestock animal focus, as well as a human health focus, but we also heard about a few studies using wild animals.
As I’ve previously discussed, conferences are a great way to interact with other scientists. Not only can you learn from similar work, but you can often gain insights into new ways to solve research problems inherent to your system by looking at what people in different fields are trying, something that you might otherwise miss just by combing relevant literature online. A meeting or workshop is also a great place to meet other similarly focused scientists to set up collaborators that span academia, government, non-profit, and industry sectors.
It was great to catch up with Dr. Ben Wenner, now at Purdue Agribusiness, and meet Yairy Roman-Garcia, grad student at the Ohio State University.
This year, I was excited for one of my abstracts to be accepted as a poster presentation, and honored to have the other upgraded from poster to talk! Stay tuned for details about both of those projects in the coming weeks, and be sure to check this meeting out in April, 2019.
Today, the research team that I am a part of submitted a grant which I co-wrote with Dr. Tim Seipel, along with Dr. Fabian Menalled, Dr. Pat Carr, and Dr. Zach Miller. We submitted to the Organic Transitions Program (ORG) through the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The culmination of months of work, and some 12+ hour days this past week to meet today’s deadline, this grant will hopefully fund some very exciting work in agriculture!
Research relies on grant money to fund projects, regardless of the type of institution performing the research, though commercial research centers may partially self-fund projects. Most new research hires to universities will receive a “start-up package” which includes some funding for a few years to buy equipment, pay for a small, preliminary project, or temporarily hire a technician. Start-up funds are designed to hold a researcher over for a year or two until they may apply for and receive grant funding of their own. Sooner or later, everyone in academia writes a grant.
Cartoon Credit
Grants may be available for application on a regular basis throughout the year, but some grant calls are specific to a topic and are made annually. These have one submission date during the year, and a large number of federal grants are due during in the first quarter of the year, a.k.a. Grant Season. University researchers find themselves incredibly pressed for time from January to March and will hole up in their office for days at a time to write complex grants. Despite the intention of starting your writing early, and taking the time to thoroughly discuss your project design with all your co-PDs well before you start writing to avoid having to rewrite it all again, most researchers can attest that these 20-30 pages grants can get written over from scratch 2 or 3 times, even before going through a dozen rounds of group editing.
The Bright Idea
Most large grants, providing several hundred thousand to over a million in funding over several years, require project teams with multiple primary researchers (called Principal Investigators or Project Directors) to oversee various aspects of research, in addition to other personnel (students, technicians, subcontractors). One researcher may conceptualize the project and approach other researchers (usually people they have worked with in the past, or new hires) to join the project. Project ideas may get mulled over for several years before they mature into full grant submissions, or go through multiple versions and submissions before they are perfected.
The grant I just co-wrote investigates the use of cover crops in Montana grain production. Briefly, cover crops are plant species which improve the soil quality but which you aren’t necessarily intending to eat or sell. They are grown in fields before or after the cash crop (ex. wheat) has been grown and harvested. Legumes like peas, beans, or alfalfa, are a popular choice because they fix nitrogen from its gaseous form in the atmosphere into a solid form in soil which other plants (like wheat) can use. Other popular cover crop plants are great at bio-remediation of contaminated soils, like those in the mustard family (1, 2, 3). Planting cover crops in an otherwise empty (fallow) field can out-compete weeds that may grow up later in the year, and they can prevent soil erosion from being blown or washed away (taking the nutrients with it). For our project, we wanted to know how different cover crop species affect the soil microbial diversity, reduce weeds, put nutrients back into soil, and improve the production of our crop.
We designed this project in conjunction with the Montana Organic Association, the Organic Advisory and Research Council, and Montana organic wheat farmers who wanted research done on specific cover crops that they might use, in order to create a portfolio of cover crops that each farmer could use in specific situations. As these organizations comprise producers from across the state, our research team was able to get perspective on which cover crops are being used already, what growing conditions they will and won’t work in (as much of Montana is extremely dry), and what production challenges growers face inherent to planting, managing, and harvesting different plant types.
Drafting Your Team
When you assemble a research team, you want to choose Project Directors who have different experiences and focuses and who will oversee different parts of the project. A well-crafted research team can bring their respective expertise to bear in designing a large and multi-faceted project. For our grant, I am the co-PD representing the microbial ecology and plant-microbe interaction facet, about a third of the scope of the grant. We will also be investigating these interactions under field settings, which requires a crop production and agroecology background, as well as expanding the MSU field days to include organic-specific workshops and webinars, which requires an extension specialty.
Because grant project teams are made up of researchers with their own projects and goals, in addition to providing valuable perspective they may also change the scope or design of your project. This can be extremely beneficial early on in the grant-writing phase, especially as you may not have considered the limitations of your study, or your goals are too unambitious or too lofty. For example, the cover crop species you want to test may not grow well under dry Montana conditions, do you have a back-up plan? However, as the submission deadline looms larger, changing the focus of your study can cost you precious writing time. Working in a research team requires a high degree of organization, a flair for communication, and an ability to work flexibly with others.
All grants center around a Project Narrative, and funding agencies will provide detailed instructions on how to format your project grant. Pay strict attention- in very competitive pools your grant can be flagged or rejected for not having the appropriate file names or section headers. The Narrative gives introductory background on your topic that details the research that has previously been published. Ideally, it also includes related studies that you and your team have published, and/or preliminary data from projects you are still working on. The aim is to provide a reasoned argument that you have correctly identified a problem, and that your project will fill in the knowledge gaps to work towards a solution. Grant panels are made up of researchers in a related field, but they may not be intimately aware of your type of research. So, you need to be very specific in explaining your reasoning for doing this study. If your justification seems weak, your project may be designated as “low priority” work and won’t get funded.
In our case, cover crops have been used by farmers already, but not much basic research has been done on the impacts of picking one species over another to plant. Thus, when cover crops fail, it may be unclear if it was because of unfavorable weather, because the previous crop influenced the soil in ways which were detrimental to your new crop, because you seeded your crop too sparsely and weeds were able to sneak in and out-compete, because you seeded too densely and your crop was competing with itself, or something else entirely.
You also need to identify the specific benefits of your project. Will you answer questions? Will you create a new product for research or commercial use? Will organic producers be able to use what you have learned to improve their farm production? Will you teach students? When you are identifying a need for knowledge and describing who or what will benefit from this study, you need to identify “stakeholders”. These are people who are interested in your work, not people who are directly financially invested. For us, our stakeholders are organic wheat farmers in Montana and the Northern Great Plains who want to integrate cover crops into their farming as an organic and sustainable way to improve crops and reduce environmental impact. Not only did our stakeholders directly inform our project design, but we will be working closely with them to host Field Day workshops, film informative webinars, and disseminate our results and recommendations to producers.
Crafting Your Experimental Plan
Once you have identified a problem or research question, you need to explain exactly how you will answer it. For experiments in the laboratory or field, you need to be incredibly specific about your design. How many samples will you take and when? Will you have biological replicates? Biological replicates are identical treatments on multiple individual organisms (like growing a single cover crop species in four different pots) to help you differentiate if the results you see are because of variation in how the individual grows or because of the treatment you used. Do you have technical replicates? Technical replication is when you analyze the same sample multiple times, like sequencing it twice to make sure that your technology creates reproducible results. Will you collect samples which will provide the right type of information to answer your question? Do your collection methods prevent sample deterioration, and how long will you keep your samples in case you need to repeat a test?
We then put each species into a bag to be dried and weighed.
We need to filter out the particles or they will clog the sprayer. Also pictured: Dr. Fabian Menalled.
The core sampler is used to collect soil from certain depths.
Climate change simulators.
In addition to describing exactly what you will do, you need to explain what might go wrong and how you will deal with that. This is called the Pitfalls and Limitations section. Because basic research needs to be done in controlled environments, your study may be limited by a “laboratory effect”: plants grown in a greenhouse will develop differently than they will in a field. Or, you might not be able to afford the gold-standard of data analysis (RNA sequencing of the transcriptome still costs hundreds of dollars per sample and we anticipate over 1,200 samples from this project) so you need to justify how other methods will still answer the question.
Supporting Documents
Even after explaining your research question in the Narrative and your design in the Methods sections, your grant-writing work is still far from complete. You will need to list all of the Equipment and research Facilities currently available to you to prove that your team can physically perform the experiment. If you will have graduate students, you need a Mentoring Plan to describe how the research team will train and develop the career of said student. If you will be working with people outside of the research team, you will need Letters of Support to show that your collaborators are aware of the project and have agreed to work with you, or that you have involved your stakeholders and they support your work. I was delighted by the enthusiasm shown towards this project by Montana organic producers and their willingness to write us letters of support with only a few days’ notice! You’ll also need a detailed timeline and plan for disseminating your results to make sure that you can meet project goals and inform your stakeholders.
Poster presentation at ASM 2016.
Perhaps the most difficult accessory document is the Budget, for which you must price out almost all the items you will be spending money on. Salary, benefits (ex. health insurance), tuition assistance, travel to scientific conferences, journal publication costs, travel to your research locations, research materials (ex. seeds, collection tubes, gloves, etc.), cost to analyze samples (ex. cost of sequencing or soil nutrient chemical analysis) cost to produce webinars, and every other large item must be priced out for each year of the grant. The Budget Narrative goes along with that, where you explain why you are requesting the dollar amount for each category and show that you have priced them out properly. For large pieces of equipment, you may need to include quotes from companies, or for travel to scientific conferences you may need airline and hotel prices to justify the costs.
On top of what you need to complete the study, called Direct Costs, you also need to request money for Indirect Costs. This is overhead that is paid to the institution that you will be working at to pay for the electricity, water, heating, building space, building security, or other utilities that you will use, as well as for the administrative support staff at the institution. Since nearly all grants are submitted through an organization (like universities), instead of as an individual, the university will handle the money and do all the accounting for you. Indirect costs pay for vital research support, but they run between 10-44% of the dollar amount that you ask for depending on the type of grant and institution, potentially creating a hefty financial burden that dramatically reduces the available funding for the project. On a $100,000 grant, you may find yourself paying $44,000 of that directly to the university.
The Budget is by far the most difficult piece to put together, because the amount of money you have available for different experiments will determine how many, how large, and how intensive they are. Often, specific methods or whole experiments are redesigned multiple times to fit within the financial constraints you have. If you factor in the experimental design changes that all your co-PDs are making on the fly, having to balance the budget and reconstruct your narrative on an hourly basis to reflect these changes, and the knowledge that some grants only fund 6-8 projects a year and if you miss this opportunity you may not have future salary to continue working at your job, it’s easy to see why so many researchers find Grant Season to be extremely stressful.
According to National Day Calendar, it’s National Employee Appreciation Day! Many organizations have an annual Staff Appreciation Day or Week, and rightly so. Research staff in academia, as well as general staff, are often quietly under appreciated. Research staff can be costly, especially because many universities insist that research positions have salary and benefits fully-funded by grants. Many labs thus rely on undergraduate student researchers, who work for minimum wage or might even pay for university “research credits”, to help provide labor.
While many undergraduates find themselves performing unglamorous routine lab maintenance (anything from washing dishes, to pre-weighing commonly used supplies, to dusting, to inventory), as a researcher I can attest to how vital these tasks are. Working in a molecular biology lab, dust and other contaminants had to be minimized and it was extremely helpful to have undergraduates who were able to dust multiple times a day. When culturing bacterial isolates, I would go through hundreds of culturing tubes every week, which all needed to be autoclave sterilized, emptied, washed, and re-sterilized. This was a massive amount of effort unto itself, and I would not have been able to accomplish my culture work without. Perhaps the best example was my study of probiotics in newborn lambs. I had 24 lambs which were only 4 days old, which needed to be fed every 4-5 hours, sometimes by hand, as well as weighed, sampled, and cleaned on a regular basis. Without numerous undergraduate volunteers, I would have found myself sleeping at the barn for two months.
Not only is it polite to appreciate the staff who keep your work moving, but proper gratitude can go a long way towards improving work relationships, job satisfaction, and performance. So get out there and start thanking!
Agriculture is consistently Montana’s largest economic sector, but as an arid state we need to prepare for the challenges brought on by changing weather patterns. Yesterday, agricultural producers, scientists, special interest groups, lawmakers, and the general public came together at the Bozeman Public Library to talk about the future of climate change and what it means for people in the agricultural industry and research sector. The event was organized by Plowing Forward, a collaborative group to coordinate local Ag. education efforts.
“If you’ve eaten today, then you’re involved in agriculture.” -Chris Christiaens at the Plowing Forward meeting in Bozeman, MT, Feb 10, 2017
Opening remarks were led by Chris Christiaens, lobbyist and Project Specialist for the Montana Farmers Union, based in Great Falls, MT. Chris gave us some perspective on how Montana farming and ranching has changed over time, especially over the last 10 years,including changes to the growing season, harvest times, water usage, the types of plants which are able to survive here. He reminded us that the effect of climate on agriculture affects all of us.
Chris Christiaens, Project Specialist for Montana Farmers Union.
Next, we heard from Montana’s Senator Jon Tester, who runs a farm in northern Montana that has been in his family since 1912. The Senator spoke to his personal experiences with farming and how his management practices had adapted over the years to deal with changing temperature and water conditions. Importantly, he spoke about how agriculture is a central industry to the United States in ways that will become even more apparent in the coming years as the negative effects of climate change affect more and more areas. Food security, a peaceful way of life, and economic vitality (not just in Montana or the United States, but globally), were contingent upon supporting agricultural production under adverse events. He assured agricultural stakeholders that he continues to support production, research, and education, including the work we do in the laboratory as well as out in the field to promote agriculture.
Montana Senator Jon Tester
Next, we heard from three professors from Montana State University. Dr. Cathy Whitlock, a Professor of Earth Sciences, who is also the Director for the MSU Institute on Ecosystems, and a Lead Coordinator for the Montana Climate Assessment. The Montana Climate Assessment seeks to assemble past and current research on Montana climate in order to assess trends, make predictions about the future, and help both researchers and producers to tailor their efforts based on what is happening at the regional level. The Assessment is scheduled for release in August, 2017, and will allow for faster dissemination of research information online.
Dr. Whitlock’s introduction to the MCA was continued by Dr. Bruce Maxwell, a Professor of Agroecology, as well as the Agriculture Sector Lead for the Montana Climate Assessment. He summarized current research on the present water availability in Montana, as well as what we might see in the future. He warned that drier summers were likely, and while winters may get wetter, if they continue to get warmer that snow runoff will flow into rivers before the ground has thawed. This means snow melt will flow out of the region more quickly and not be added to local ground water sources for use here. To paraphrase Bruce, a longer growing season does you no good if you don’t have any water.
Dr. Bruce Maxwell, Montana State University
We also heard from my current post-doctoral advisor, Dr. Fabian Menalled, Professor of Weed Ecology Management and Cropland Weed Specialist (Extension). He presented some of the results from our ongoing project at Fort Ellis on the interactions between climate change (hot and dry conditions), farm management system (conventional or organic), disease status, and weed competition on wheat production. Increased temperatures and decreased moisture reduced wheat production but increased the amount of cheatgrass (downy brome), a weed which competes with wheat and can reduce wheat growth. My work on the soil bacterial diversity under these conditions didn’t make it into the final presentation, though. I have only just begun the data analysis, which will take me several months due to the complexity of our treatments, but here is a teaser: we know very little about soil bacteria, and the effects we are seeing are not exactly what we predicted!
Here is the video of Dr. Menalled’s presentation (just under 9 minutes):
Lastly, we heard from a local producer who spoke to his experience with ranching on a farm that had been run continuously for well over 100 years. His talk reflected the prevailing sentiment of the presentations: that farm practices had changed over the last few decades and people in agriculture were already responding to climate change, even if previously they wouldn’t put a name to it. The presentations concluded with a question and answer session with the entire panel, as well as a reminder that we all have the right and the obligation to be invested in our food system. Whether we grow produce or raise livestock for ourselves or others, whether we research these biological interactions, whether we set the policy that affects an entire industry, or whether we are just a consumer, we owe it to ourselves to get involved and make sure our voice is heard. To that end, I wrote a letter to my legislators (pictured below), and in the next few weeks I’ll be writing posts about how I participate in science (and agriculture) on the local and national level.
2016 started with a bang when I launched this site and joined Twitter for the first time! For the first quarter of the year, I was a post-doctoral researcher in the Yeoman Lab in the Department of Animal and Range Sciences at Montana State University. I was working on a total of eight grants, ranging from small fellowships to million dollar projects, both as a principal investigator and as a co-PI. I was also doing the bioinformatic analysis for multiple projects, totaling nearly 1,000 samples, as well as consulting with several graduate students about their own bioinformatic analyses.
In late spring, my position in the Yeoman lab concluded, and I began a post-doctoral position in the Menalled Lab in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at MSU. This position gave me the opportunity to dramatically increase my skill-set and learn about plant-microbe interactions in agricultural fields. My main project over the summer was studying the effect of climate and other stresses on wheat production and soil microbial diversity, and this fall I have been investigating the legacy effects of these stressors on new plant growth and microbial communities. I have extracted the DNA from all of my Fort Ellis summer trial soil samples, and look forward to having new microbial data to work with in the new year. Based on the preliminary data, we are going to see some cool treatment effects!
Over the summer, I attended the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, MA in June, where I presented a poster on the microbial diversity in organic and conventional farm soil, and the Joint Annual Meeting for three different animal science professional societies in Salt Lake City, UT in July, where I gave my first two oral conference presentations. One was on the effect of a juniper-based diet on rumen bacteria in lambs, and the other was on the biogeography of the calf digestive system and how location-specific bacteria correlate to immune-factor expression.
Thanks to a lot of hard work from myself and many collaborators, a number of research projects were accepted for publication in scientific journals, including the microbial diversity of agricultural soils, in reindeer on a lichen diet, and in relation to high-fat diets in mice, it also included work on virulent strains of Streptococcus pyogenes, and a review chapter on the role of methanogens in human gastrointestinal disease.
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Looking forward
A whopping thirteen manuscripts are still in review at scientific journals or are in preparation waiting to be submitted! Some of those are primarily my projects, and for others I added my skills to the work of other researchers. Editing all those is going to keep me plenty busy for the next few months. I’ll also be writing several more grants in early 2017, and writing a blog post about the Herculean task that can be.
I’ll be concluding my greenhouse study by March of 2017, just in time to prepare for another field season at Fort Ellis, on the aforementioned climate change study that is my main focus. In January, I’ll be spending time in the lab helping to process and sequence DNA from my 270 soil samples, and begin the long task of data quality assurance, processing, and analysis. I’m not worried, though, 270 samples isn’t the most I’ve worked with and bioinformatic analysis is my favorite part of the project!
This year, I am hoping to attend two conferences that I have never previously attended, and present data at both of them. The first will be the 2017 Congress on Gut Function in Chicago, IL in April, and the second will be the Ecological Society of America’s Annual Meeting in Portland, OR in August. Both conferences will give me the opportunity to showcase my work, network with researchers, and catch up with old friends.
If 2017 is anything like the past few years, it’s going to be full of new projects, new collaborators, new skills, and new opportunities for me, and I can’t wait! So much of what I’ve accomplished over the last year has been possible because of the hard work, enthusiasm, and creativity of my colleagues, students, friends, and family, and I continue to be grateful for their support. I’d also like to thank anyone who has been kind enough to read my posts throughout the last year; it’s been a pleasure putting my experiences into words for you and I appreciate the time and interest you put in. I look forward to sharing more science with you next year!
Every political season brings about uncertainty regarding the future of policy, funding, and cultural beliefs, and the field of science is no exception. The surprising results this November have led many scientists and other academics to fear for their jobs and research in the coming years.
Part of this stems from a growing trend of members of the public distrusting scientists (discussed here), or the rise of false information regarding serious issues such as climate change, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), vaccinations, etc., that is leading to a disparity between what scientists accept as true and what the public accepts as true. Regardless of which side of an issue you fall on, the consensus seems to be that the public is lacking scientific literacy and scientists are lacking in public outreach (hence the basis for my website).
Some of this disparity develops from public opinion and governmental policy, which can affect what research is deemed important enough to be funded. For example, if an administration denies the existence and causes of climate change, it sends a message to the public that this research and this theory are invalid or unimportant. Not only can this influence state and federal policy (1, 2), but usually means that the field is unlikely to receive state or federal research grant funding. Not only does this prevent a better understanding of scientific issues, like climate change, but it prevents technological advances which improve quality of life and the economy, especially since a good deal of commercial technology companies utilize basic research from academic institutions as publications and raw date are typically publicly available.
“The Changing Nature of U.S. Basic research: Trends in Performance”, SSTI. U&C = universities and colleges.
It also means that people relying on research grants for salary (like myself, and most other post-doctoral researchers, research associates, graduate and undergraduate researchers, technicians, and some extension outreach personnel) find themselves without jobs. Research-based salary also means that you are limited to a short contract based on the project, anywhere from a month to several years. From experience, a short-term funded position (a year or less) means that you spend a significant amount of time applying to other jobs (a lengthy process) or writing more research grants (an incredibly lengthy process that I’ll discuss in a few months- which take at least 6 – 8 weeks just to write). This can impede on your other job or social responsibilities.
Prior to the jump in federal funding during the Cold War, research was funded by universities themselves and smaller organizations. Most large-scale research grants in the last 50 years, however, have been federally funded. Organizations such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US Department of Defense (DoD), the US Department of Energy (DoE), and others release funding calls on a regular basis. Some funding calls are general and will accept any project type, but many are specific to a particular field or research question (e.g. climate change, cancer, etc.). There are many other organizations or companies which will fund research in a very specific field (such as Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), which funds organic and sustainable agriculture), or provide small fellowships. Philanthropic organizations also fund research, usually targeted towards a specific disease or special interest, and tend to be small but which can help bring funding to obscure fields.
While the total dollar amount of money put into research and development (R & D) in the US has dramatically increased over the last 50 years, the amount the federal government has been putting in has remained relatively stable over the last 10 years. Some cite the availability of other funding sources, such as universities themselves, as making up more of the costs. However, this also comes with a price, as the reduction in state funding has been cited as the cause for rising tuition, and universities are unwilling to reduce tuition even after funding has been reinstated.
The increase in funding has largely been in biomedical and engineering fields, with other areas of research remaining relatively stable.
Laboratory equipment and technology is much more complex and expensive than it was even a decade ago. The percentage of funding going into basic research, from multiple funding sources, has also declined over the last 10 years, which means research projects have to focus on short-term goals instead of long-term, complex projects that gather more data. Basic research aims to understand a system, rather than manipulate it or develop a product, and is the necessary first step which opens up decades of further, more applied, research.
The increase in number of researchers and projects/researcher, coupled with funding stagnation, can massively increase grant competition. Over the past few years, it has been holding steady at 22% for NSF, and 18-25% for NIH, although their data is more complicated because they saw an increase in budget and an increase in total number of PIs funded, yet a reduction in percent of projects funded (indicating that more many more grants were submitted overall). The USDA is also more complicated to track because of the number of grant programs within the USDA, each of which put forward different targeted grant funding calls each year. In 2013, USDA AFRI had a 10% funding success rate. Manually checking grant funding calls reveals grant-specific success rates, upwards of 30% funding success; however, many of these grants with a higher rate of success also require you to match their funding with funding from another source. So if you have a 1/3 chance of getting that USDA grant, and a 1/5 chance of getting a matching NIH grant, your actual chances of getting all that funding are 1/3 x 1/5 = 1/15.
Taken altogether, the clearest trend regarding research in the US is that it’s an integral part to our way of life and it’s not going anywhere. Whatever your political views, it’s important that scientists, citizens, and politicians come together across the aisle to do what’s best for the future of the US, and that’s going to necessitate a strong support of scientific work.
Finals are upon us and that can only mean that I’ve committed myself to reading a stack of manuscripts that students wrote as the final project for the bioinformatics lab I am teaching! This semester we took raw 16S rRNA sequencing data, analyzed it, interpreted it, and here are the results. Many of my students had never used command line based programs at the beginning of the semester, and now they can discuss the merits of different clustering techniques- I am so proud of them!
A review chapter that I put together last year is now available online or by purchasing the textbook! The chapter explores the current breadth of knowledge about methanogenic archaea that live in the human digestive tract and their involvement in human gut diseases. These archaea produce methane using hydrogen and carbon products that bacteria create during fermentation, and it’s unclear how the interaction of host immune system, bacterial diversity, and archaeal diversity can trigger disease or convalescence.
a small meeting for researchers with a specific focus on the gastrointestinal tract, which is held every two years in Chicago, Illinois. The 
The Ishaq Lab 
