Mini-grants of up to $10,000 are available to support the acquisition of critical preliminary data for grant submission. Funds must be used for services provided by the Directed Differentiation Core (DDC). Awarded funds will cover essential lot-tested cell culture reagents and consumables in the core, and other associated experimental costs. Please contact Dr. April Craft (april.craft@childrens.harvard.edu) to discuss opportunities and advantages to using DDC services to support your ongoing and future research programs.

Examples of potential services include using pluripotent stem cell models to validate gene, protein or signaling pathway function, evaluating the differentiation potential of genetically-modified cells, proof-of-concept that desired cell type(s) can be produced from a cell line of interest, production of developmentally-relevant cells for -omics analyses, training to establish primary mouse cell cultures (i.e., limb bud micromass), training and support to generate a clonal mouse ESC reporter line, development of a relevant cell culture assay to test investigator initiated hypotheses. Submissions that benefit from the use of more than one of the CSR Cores are welcome (i.e., the RNA sequencing and Spatial Transcriptomic Core, Musculoskeletal Cell Core).

Applications must include:

1. NIH style biosketch with other support pages.
2. Title, Specific Aims, funding deadline (must be within 6 months), agency to which grant is being submitted and type of proposal (R21, R01 etc)
3. A brief description (300 words limit) of the experimental plan and why the investigations to be supported by the Core grant are critical for the grant proposal.
4. For post-docs, a letter from the current mentor must be included indicating:
….. – the studies proposed will support funding for the applicant’s independence
….. – plans for the applicant’s transition to independence.
5. Budget, based on consultation with relevant Core director(s).