The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience awarded $100,000 to two interdisciplinary teams under a new initiative, the Petit Bioengineering and Bioscience Collaborative Grant program, which was created to support early-stage innovative biotechnology research.

The seed grant recipients address a wide range of topics including profiling  single cells to understand the heterogeneity of different cell types and new approaches to traumatic brain injury.  The call for proposals was welcomed by teams of Petit Institute faculty with one faculty member from Georgia Tech’s College of Science and one from the College of Engineering.

Melissa Kemp, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department for Biomedical Engineering and Greg Gibson, professor in the School of Biology, proposed a project which aims to develop the measurement tools for relating variability in both genomic and protein information at the single cell level. The ability to conduct this type of profiling in single cells represents a remarkable technological advance in the last two years.

Michelle LaPlaca, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Al Merrill, professor in the School of Biology, are partnering to merge traumatic brain injury with lipid biology in the hopes of evaluating, for the first time, plasma membrane breakdown mechanisms and lipid signaling following traumatic brain injury.