Robert Fleischmann and Scott Peterson
The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, MD 20878.
The recent development of more robust hardware, chemistry, and software for DNA microarrays has resulted in the promise of a high-throughput technology capable of providing comparative sequence data and insights into gene regulation in a variety of organisms under a variety of stress conditions. Funding agencies developing programs to promote these technologies and their proper application to experimentation must develop relevant program goals and be able to critically evaluate applicants in a variety of areas. This presentation will focus on examining a variety of issues that funding agencies are likely to face in developing program initiatives and evaluating applications. These include the applicants ability to conduct high-throughput microarray experimentation, the technical and experimental limitations of the technology, the types of experimentation to be funded (hypothesis driven vs explorative), funding initiatives currently active or under consideration by other agencies (centralization vs distributing technology), and data access and sharing.