Survey of AIDS Prevention Funders: Which Programs Are Funded, and Why?, A?

This survey of foundations across the United States asked questions about the amount of money they spend on AIDS and HIV prevention, the types of prevention projects and populations their grants served, and the sources of AIDS information used by the foundation staff. The results were then compared to the types of projects known to be effective and to the populations most at risk for HIV infection.These organizations funded a diverse range of HIV prevention programs, with a total of 583 grants worth over $8.1 million. This represents almost a quarter of all AIDS-related funding by foundations in the United States

Reproducibility of fluorescent expression from engineered biological constructs in E. coli

We present results of the first large-scale interlaboratory study carried out in synthetic biology, as part of the 2014 and 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions. Participants at 88 institutions around the world measured fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli. Few participants were able to measure absolute fluorescence, so data was analyzed in terms of ratios. Precision was strongly related to fluorescent strength, ranging from 1.54-fold standard deviation for the ratio between strong promoters to 5.75-fold for the ratio between the strongest and weakest promoter, and while host strain did not affect expression ratios, choice of instrument did. This result shows that high quantitative precision and reproducibility of results is possible, while at the same time indicating areas needing improved laboratory practices.Peer reviewe