(Core D: Pilot Project Core) The purpose of the Pilot Project Core is to support new activities or directions that are beyond the scope of the center and to take advantage of new opportunities. In many cases, successful pilot projects will lead to publications and subsequent grant applications. As such, some pilot projects will be explicitly designed to collect pilot data to show feasibility, including but not limited to heritability. Pilot projects will not be used to supplement or prolong ongoing research, nor will they serve as bridge funds for the maintenance of ongoing but unfunded research. In the prior funding period, we supported 17 projects; we present the topics of the previously funded pilot projects, the PIs, demographics of the PIs, and outcomes of those projects. In the next funding period, we expect to fund several types of pilot projects: 1) We hope to fund pilot projects that support follow-up studies that target specific genes identified by our GWAS. Such studies may use mutant rats, viral vectors, or pharmacological agents. CRISPR and other gene editing technologies have opened the doors to mutant rat studies, which is one of the reasons for the increasing popularity of rat genetics studies. We provide an example pilot project that proposes to make and study rats with mutations in the genes Cadm2 and Gprm6b, which have been implicated in risky and impulsive behavior in humans. 2) We hope to fund the development of new statistical and bioinformatic methodology that can be used to better analyze data generated by this center. We provide an example pilot project that examines the impact of the genotype of the rat?s cagemate on that rat?s phenotype. 3) Based on feedback from our external advisory board, we began offering pilot awards in which we gave applicants HS rats that could be used for collecting preliminary data. These awards are less expensive and have already provided data for two funded grant applications. We will continue to use this approach in this renewal. 4) Finally, although our center is entirely focused on rat genetics, we have used pilot projects to support and coordinate with human geneticists and we hope to continue to do so. For example, in our prior funding period, we helped to support a postdoc who was working with a cohort of more than 23,000 genotyped subjects in which delay discounting had been measured. Delay discounting is also being measured in HS rats in Project 3, we proposed an integrated analyses of these datasets, as described in Project 4. We will describe how pilot project applications are solicited, how they are evaluated, and how we use those evaluations, and other considerations, to make funding decisions. Pilot project funding will be awarded to a mixture of male and female, new-, junior-, and senior-level investigators. We also describe how we will ensure that all pilot projects will comply with all applicable federal regulations. In the Research Strategy section, we summarize the impact of the pilot projects funded in the prior funding period and describe example projects that we would consider for funding.
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