For 75 years, the Population Reference Bureau has been informing people about the population dimensions of important social, economic, and political issues. Our mission is to be the leader in providing timely and objective information on U.S. and international population trends and their implications. To increase the quality and relevance of our work and expand our reach and influence, we frequently collaborate with other organizations both in the United States and other countries. Our donors and partners government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and universities include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations Population Fund, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Save the Children, the University of Costa Rica, Thailand's Mahidol University, the Population Council, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Funded in 1999 by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the Research Center for Alcoholic Liver and Pancreatic Diseases is a collaborative effort among the leaders in the study of alcoholic liver and pancreatic diseases in the Los Angeles area. Our research attempts to elucidate the mechanisms by which ethanol sensitizes and primes the liver and pancreas to diseases. Unifying all Center investigations, our Center's goals are based on the concept that manifestation of alcoholic liver and pancreatic diseases is dependent on critical interactions between alcohol and secondary factors. These secondary factors include diet, concomitant use of drugs, viral hepatitis infection, and gender. We believe that the best approach to elucidate the mechanisms of the diseases is to define the mode and nature of these interactive processes. This would lead to an improved understanding of individual predisposition to the diseases and development of better modalities to protect the liver and pancreas. The Cirrhosis Research Program is an important development of the Center.

Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, established the Salk Institute for Biological Studies more than 40 years ago. His goal was to create an institute that would serve as a "crucible for creativity" to pursue questions about the basic principles of life. He wanted biologists and others to work together to explore the wider implications of their discoveries for the future of humanity. Today, the Salk Institute conducts its biological research under the guidance of 58 faculty investigators, employing a scientific staff of more than 850, including visiting scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students.

The San Diego Zoo's department of Conservation and Research for Endangered SpeciesCRESwas founded in 1975. Originally called the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, CRES is one of the largest zoo-based research centers in the world. Dedicated to preserving and protecting rare and endangered wildlife and their habitats, the research conducted at CRES is critical in the war against extinction. Through painstaking measures, CRES researchers gather scientific knowledge about the unique needs of wildlife, then translate this data into strategies to better manage the captive species while protecting populations in the wild. More than 75 highly trained CRES research professionals are dedicated to this missionto develop, gather, and increase knowledge vital for the establishment of self-sustaining populations of wildlife. Scientific research at CRES takes a variety of forms. From behavioral studies at the San Diego Zoo's SBC Giant Panda Research Station to banking endangered plant seeds at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park to high-tech genetic studies at the Frozen Zoo, CRES works to gain greater scientific insight and potentially solve the world's complicated conservation issues.

The world's most biologically rich ecosystem, the tropical rainforest, is also its most poorly understood. To better understand and manage tropical rainforests, the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, through a consortium of scientific collaborators and institutions around the world, coordinates a network of long-term research programs in the natural and social sciences. The central feature of the CTFS network is the standardized Forest Dynamics Plot. Within each plot, every tree over one centimeter in diameter is identified according to species and monitored through time. CTFS is now monitoring more than 3 million trees of 6000 species, at least 10% of all known tropical tree species.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution (STRI) in Panama, is a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution based outside of the United States, is dedicated to understanding biological diversity. STRI aims to offer research facilities that allow staff scientists, fellows, and visiting scientists to achieve their research objectives. The 38 staff scientists reside in the tropics and are encouraged to pursue their own research priorities without geographic limitations. The continuity of their long-term programs enables in-depth investigations that attract an elite group of fellows and visitors. Active support for fellows and visitors leverages resources further and attracts more than 900 scientists to STRI each year.

The Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at NSF (SBE) supports research that builds fundamental knowledge of human behavior, interaction, and social and economic systems, organizations and institutions. It does this through its Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES). To improve understanding of science and engineering, SBE provides tools for tracking the human and institutional resources vital to building the nation's science and engineering infrastructure. It does this through its Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS), which is the nation's primary source of data on the science and engineering enterprise.

The nanoScience and Technology Studies consortium at the University of South Carolina aims to provide the highest quality scholarship and commentary on issues of nano-science and -technology: to define and elucidate the fundamental philosophical ethical, legal, political and societal issues that the development of nano-science and -technology produce; to articulate the benefits and risks, opportunities and problems, collaborations and conflicts, of nano-science and -technology [NST] that may have significant societal impact; to articulate fruitful ways to approach these opportunities and problems, collaborations and conflicts; and to propose public and private sector approaches for providing better democratic procedures and policies concerning the development of nanotechnology.

In 1999, the Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) became the first new NCRR-funded National Primate Research Center (NPRC) in over 35 years. The SNPRC brings a number of unique strengths to the NPRC program, stemming from a long, productive history of nonhuman primate research at its host institution, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR). These unique strengths include the worlds largest captive baboon population, the worlds largest and best-characterized pedigreed primate population, the worlds largest group of geneticists committed to research with and management of captive nonhuman primates, one of the largest nonhuman primate census of any NPRC, the largest chimpanzee census of any NRPC, the capacity for nonhuman primate studies in Biocontainment Level 4, and a veterinary technical staff experienced in the management and use of nonhuman primates ranging from chimpanzees to marmosets.

Stem cell therapy can be defined as a part of a group of new techniques, or technologies that rely on replacing diseased or dysfunctional cells with healthy, functioning ones. These new techniques are being applied experimentally to a wide range of human disorders, including many types of cancer, neurological diseases such as Parkinson's Disease and ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), spinal cord injuries, and diabetes. It is the goal of the Stem Cell Research Foundation (SCRF) to help realize these hopes by supporting innovative basic and clinical research in the emerging and critical area of stem cell therapy. Since 2000, SCRF has awarded more than $1.8 million in research grants. SCRF is currently supporting a total of 6 research grants. A complete list of all research grants is available in PDF format for viewing or printing.

Application of the principles of in vitro selection and directed evolution to peptides and proteins is a powerful tool for investigating protein function and structure and for obtaining insight into the pathways by which enzymes evolve in nature. Our approach has been to generate stable, covalent RNA-protein fusions in a completely in vitro system. We do this by covalently linking puromycin, an antibiotic that mimics an aminoacylated tRNA, to the 3' end of a synthetic mRNA through a DNA linker. A ribosome begins translation of such a template as usual, generating a peptide as it transits the open reading frame. When the ribosome reaches the end of the open reading frame and hits the DNA linker it stalls, allowing the nearby puromycin to enter the A site of the ribosome and accept the nascent peptide chain. The resulting RNA-peptide fusions can be formed efficiently from mRNAs encoding small peptides or large proteins. We have prepared libraries of fusions encoding random peptides and are preparing to begin evolving new binding domains and enzymes. An exciting future application will be the ability to conduct side-by-side comparisons of RNA and protein evolution.

The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropic organization with interests in science, health, and education. It was founded in 1950.

The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaborative effort to address the need for consistent descriptions of gene products in different databases. The project began as a collaboration between three model organism databases, FlyBase (Drosophila), the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) and the Mouse Genome Database (MGD), in 1998. Since then, the GO Consortium has grown to include many databases, including several of the world's major repositories for plant, animal and microbial genomes.

Founded in 1992, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) is a not-for-profit research institute whose primary research interests are in structural, functional and comparative analysis of genomes and gene products from a wide variety of organisms including viruses, eubacteria (both pathogens and non-pathogens, archaea (the so-called third domain of life), and eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi and protists such as the malarial parasite).

The Jackson Laboratory, an independent, mammalian genetics research institution and an NCI-designated Cancer Center. Our mission is to improve the quality of human life through discoveries arising from our own genetic research and by enabling the research and education of others.