The rapid development of synthetic biology enables the design, construction and optimization of synthetic microbial consortia to achieve specific functions. In China, the "973" project-"Design and Construction of Microbial Consortia" was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China in January 2014. It was proposed to address the fundamental challenges in engineering natural microbial ...

Strategic research consortia as policy instruments for research coordination have been on the rise for more than a decade. Despite their rising popularity as coordination structures, there has been little comparative analysis of the actual coordination approaches such consortia develop. In order to enhance our understanding of consortia as coordination structures, this paper makes a systematic ...

Leaf composts were studied for their suppressive effects on Pythium ultimum sporangium germination, cottonseed colonization, and the severity of Pythium damping-off of cotton. A focus of the work was to assess the role of fatty-acid-metabolizing microbial communities in disease suppression. Suppressiveness was expressed within the first few hours of seed germination as revealed by reduced P. ul...

In 1970 USOE initiated a nationwide study of academic library consortia. The purpose of the study, carried out by SDC, was to develop a fund of descriptive and prescriptive information about library consortium activities. The study involved a questionnaire survey to identify and describe all known consortia, and a case-study analysis of fifteen selected consortia. This paper discusses the surve...

This study investigates economic and strategic inducements of R&D cooperation. We focus on industry and company factors that affect a firm’s rate of participation in R&D consortia. These factors are analyzed in a dynamic context using a sample of 312 Japanese firms in 74 industries between 1969 and 1992. We find a firm in an industry with weak competition and appropriability conditions has a hi...

In the current issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, Preuss and colleagues1 describe the design of the Coronary ARtery DIsease Genome-wide Replication And Meta-Analysis (CARDIoGRAM) consortium. CARDIoGRAM is one of several consortia that have formed in the past few years in order to combine data from different genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in large-scale metaanalyses. Many of ...

Microbial consortia are ubiquitous in nature and are implicated in processes of great importance to humans, from environmental remediation and wastewater treatment to assistance in food digestion. Synthetic biologists are honing their ability to program the behavior of individual microbial populations, forcing the microbes to focus on specific applications, such as the production of drugs and f...

OBJECTIVES This article reports on the progress made in addressing pediatric medical device needs through the establishment of the Pediatric Device Consortia Grant Program. Pediatric practitioners should be aware of both the imperative for well-studied devices for children and the existence of recently created resources to help foster the development of such products. METHODS This article dis...