Bio 353 - Apoptosis: A matter of life and death
Fall, 2001
Haverford College
Jenni Punt

MINI-GRANT PROPOSAL
A grant proposal advances a set of experiments to answer a scientific question. It is typically sent to granting adjacencies (governments or private organizations) and reviewed (anonymously) by other colleagues (or "peers"). Grants need to be crisp, clear, and should be written so readers who are scientists, but not experts in the field, can understand. Most proposals describe experiments that will take 3-5 years to complete. Yours is a "mini"-grant proposal" and should, therefore, describe only a single question and single experiment or tightly related set of experiments that could conceivably be performed in 6 months. These types of proposals often fall into the category of "feasibility studies" - designed to test the merits of an hypothesis and/or an innovation (if you are part of a small business).

N.B.!!! I want NO MORE than 5 single spaced pages (and will penalize longer papers). A thorough 3 page proposal would also be very acceptable. (I find it hard to imagine that one could write one in fewer than 3 pages.)

All proposals, regardless of length, tend to follow the following format or some variation thereof.

I. OBJECTIVE (OR AIMS): Half a page
What do you propose to do? More essentially, What is your hypothesis?
This part should be a single paragraph that includes the sentences: "The objective of this proposal is....." and "We (I) hypothesize that....."

II. SIGNIFICANCE (OR BACKGROUND): 1.5 pages
Why do you want to do this? How will these findings advance the field? and/or help society?
This part should describe the basis for your interest and should persuade the reader that the proposed experiments are important for our understanding, for future clinical advances, etc. You should always figure out what the priorities of the granting agency are before you write this: Are they interested in medical advances? basic science advances?

III. EXPERIMENTAL Approach: 2 pages
How do you propose to do this? This section should include an opening paragraph summarizing your approach/strategy, followed by a more detailed description of your approaches. It can include the methods or they can be outlined in a separate section.

A note on methods: You don't have to be unnecessarily detailed. In this proposal, methods are a description of the assay(s) you will use to test your theory. For example: How are you going to measure death? How are you going to assess protein associations (immunoprecipitation, Western)? How are you going to mutate your gene? If you are doing a time course, give me a range of times; if you are doing a dose response, give me a range of doses. If you need to design primers, you don't need to specify their sequence, but you do need to tell me the strategy you would use to select them (3' or 5', exon or intron, etc.)

IV. CONCLUDING STATEMENT: brief! Half to 1 page
Here you can reiterate the importance of your question and can discuss how you may interpret the data and other directions you may want to pursue after these experiments are performed.