Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

These are days of a world wide economic turmoil, most of the industry is effected and the academia as well. But even within the academia, certain fields are funded better than others. What happened to the molecular modeling funding?

An anecdotal example can be found in the following paragraphs, cited from mails by Prof. Kevin Karplus, a long standing figure in the structure prediction world, posted to different public mailing lists: 

Note: my research group is completely out of funding.  I will try to keep the servers running as long as possible as a service to the community, but new development will be slow and upgrades to the hardware (to increase capacity or speed) unlikely.  I don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep the servers running without funding. If anyone has any suggestions for granting agencies that still care about protein structure prediction, please let me know.  Otherwise I may be looking for new problems to work on. 

and also:

…We have been considering more direct prediction of supersecondary structure, but have not yet come up with a classification scheme that appeals to us.  (I say “we”, but I currently have no funding, so my current students are all scrambling to get their theses finished and I can’t get new students until I get funding again, so I really mean that I haven’t had time to work on the problem—wasting all my time writing grant proposals instead.) 

For some time now, I get the feeling from the computational biologists I interact with, that if the words “systems biology” don’t appear in your grant proposal’s first paragraph – you won’t get funded. Structural aspects and cool 3D figures just don’t cut it anymore – unless you fold the entire proteome and dock the interactome. 

To check this hypothesis, I’ve searched the NIH‘s database of approved grants for the phrases “systems biology” and “molecular modeling”. The graph below shows the number of hits (i.e. approved grants containing the phrase) per year since 2001. 

Funding: systems biology vs. molecular modeling

Two facts are apparent from examining this graph, the first is the clear  “emergence” of systems biology into biomedical research funding at 2001. The other is the decrease in funding of projects involving molecular modeling. The numbers don’t add up, in the sense that the increase in funding the networks analyzers is larger than the decrease in funding applicable research But certainly this might explain a part of the phnomenon.

One caveat is that the graph relates to the number of approved grants and not the funds themselves, and the other is that there may be better ways to categorize grants other than using these catch phrases. However the trend is clear.

Have you noticed this trend in your research? What’s your take on computational structural biology funding? is it easy to come by? What are the primary funding agencies for your research? Tell us in the comments.