Physiological and Structural Systems | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) grant opportunity titled Physiological and Structural Systems (Funding Opportunity Number: PD 07 1141) supports basic research that treats organisms as integrated, whole systems rather than as isolated parts. The central aim is to advance understanding of how interacting physiological and structural components work together, how they are shaped by environmental and evolutionary pressures, and how their connections to the rest of the organism constrain what they can do. A major theme is explaining broad organismal patterns, such as why certain anatomical architectures and regulatory strategies keep reappearing across species, and how complex networks of control and structure produce emergent outcomes like robustness, adaptability, plasticity, and resilience in the face of genetic, biochemical, morphological, and environmental variation. The program places strong value on systems-level thinking, including model building and theory development that complement experiments and help guide research on complicated functional networks.

The opportunity explicitly encourages multidisciplinary work, especially projects that sit at the interfaces of biology with physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. In practice, that means proposals may combine empirical measurements with computational modeling, quantitative analysis, network theory, biomechanics, biophysical constraints, or engineering-inspired approaches to understand how organismal systems are organized and controlled. Competitive projects are those that can move beyond describing parts to explaining coordination, feedback, and integration, and that can account for organism-level properties emerging from interactions among many components.

NSF frames the solicitation around three programmatic areas. The first, Symbiosis, Defense and Self recognition, focuses on the processes and structures that enable close biological interactions between organisms, covering the full range from commensalism and mutualism to parasitism and host-pathogen relationships. The emphasis is on dynamics: how these associations start, persist, destabilize, or dissolve, and what mechanisms drive those changes. Proposals in this area are expected to address underlying communication and signaling, immunological recognition and response, feedback loops, and reciprocal adjustments by the interacting partners, with the goal of explaining stability and function in complex multi-organism systems.

The second area, Processes, Structures and Integrity, is centered on organismal unity: how organisms maintain coherence and integrity as complex systems made of coordinated structures and functions. Research here is geared toward discovering or predicting how multiple functional processes and/or structural components synchronize and constrain one another to produce integrated performance. Systems approaches are particularly encouraged, especially those that can reveal coordination rules, identify key control points in networks, or explain emergent properties that are not obvious when studying components in isolation.

The third area, Organism Environment Interactions, targets how organisms perform and interact under routine, changing, or stressful environmental conditions. NSF is looking for projects that explain how genetic, biochemical, morphological, and physiological processes interact to produce integrated responses to the environment, from short-term adjustments to long-term evolutionary patterns. There is special interest in understanding why these interactions sometimes yield emergent properties such as adaptability, phenotypic plasticity, and robustness, including both resistance (withstanding disturbance) and resilience (recovering after disturbance). Projects that use systems approaches, including quantitative and qualitative analyses, theoretical modeling, and predictive frameworks, are emphasized, particularly when they address the dynamics and control of organismal responses across multiple time scales.

In terms of funding context, the opportunity is categorized as discretionary and uses a grant funding instrument under the Science and Technology and other Research and Development activity category. It is associated with CFDA 47.074 (Biological Sciences) and does not require cost sharing or matching. The estimated total funding listed is 42,649,635, with an expected number of awards reported as 136. Historical award information provided for FY 2010 indicates that the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems funded 17 proposals that year, with a mean annual award of 216,556, offering a rough benchmark for typical annual project support.

Eligibility is listed as unrestricted, meaning it is open to any type of entity, subject to any clarifications that may appear in the full announcement text. Key dates included full proposal target dates and deadlines that recur annually, specifically January 12 and July 12 (with the document reflecting cycles around 2009 through 2011). The sponsoring agency is NSF, and program leadership is represented by multiple program directors aligned to the three topical areas, including Michael Mishkind, Mark R. Brodl, Carol A. Burdsal, Hannah V. Carey, Irwin Forseth, Mary Beth Saffo, and William E. Zamer. For access or technical issues related to the announcement, the posting references NSF grants.gov support via grantsgovsupport@nsf.gov.

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