Neutrino Donut – Writing a Good Aims Summary

Writing the Aims for your project is key to developing your commercialization strategy. The Donut recently noted a posting which best described how to write the Aim. You need to have the Title, Experimental Strategy, and Outcome or Impact.

Here is an example of the Aims section:

(Title) Aim 1 will establish an innovative mouse model for HTLV-1 Tax tumorigenesis. (Experimental Strategy) Targeting vectors containing silenced wild-type or mutant Tax genes will be knocked in to the Rosa26 locus of C57BL/6 mice. These mice will then be crossed with homozygous Lck-CRE mice, thereby excising the stop cassette and (Outcome or Impact) generating mice that express wild-type or mutant Tax proteins specifically in T cells.

(Title) Aim 2 will examine the effect of mutations that disable specific biological functions of Tax on Tax-mediated tumorigenesis. Tax can bind to and regulate the activity of members of the SRF, CREB, NF-kB and PBM protein families, each of which has been implicated in oncogenesis. (Experimental Strategy) Mice established in Aim 1 will allow us to compare for the first time the tumorigenic potential of wild-type and mutant Tax proteins in an (Outcome or Impact) effort to identify pathways that are required for Tax tumorigenesis. 

All three items should be noted in your description of the Aim. For more information, check out the author’s posting at https://www.biosciencewriters.com/NIH-Grant-Applications-The-Anatomy-of-a-Specific-Aims-Page.aspx.

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