Jason McDermott, a Senior Research Scientist in computational biology and bioinformatics at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, USA, has become one of the first to publish online his preliminary research methodology and data to gain peer reviews that he hopes will strengthen his R01 grant application to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
While the concept of online and transparent peer-reviewing of research is increasingly being adopted, it is unusual for preliminary research to enter the public domain in such a way. It represents a further innovation in the way that scientific research is becoming more open and it is a leap forward in respect of the length of time taken for new thinking to be shared among a wide audience.
The challenge faced by McDermott, who like many researchers has tried multiple times to secure NIH funding, is stark. The NIH budget peaked in 2010 at $31.2 billion, falling to $30.15 billion for fiscal year 2014. While the organisation once funded a third of the research proposals it received, for the past decade it has only funded one in six. NIH Director Francis Collins said recently that, due to inflation, the NIH budget has lost 25 percent of its purchasing power over the last decade.
McDermott's proposal (http://f1000research.com/articles/4-60/v1) describes novel computational methods to predict multi-drug resistance transporters (MDRs), the proteins responsible for moving antibiotics out of the cell. Many different bacteria can now exhibit multi-drug resistance and oppose the action of certain antibiotics rendering them ineffective. McDermott's approach aims to help predict and identify functional patterns from groups of unaligned protein sequence of MDRs in bacteria. Work in this field is intended to contribute to potential new drug development to combat antimicrobial resistance.
