The Republic of Ireland has, so far, just a single representative on the first list of grant winners from the European Research Council (ERC), the body launched a year ago to fund basic research throughout the European Union. Earlier this month, the ERC, which has €7.5 billion to allocate between now and 2013, identified the first 201 funding recipients under its "starting grants" programme for early-career researchers.
Stephen Connon, of the school of chemistry in Trinity College (TCD), will receive €1.25 million to develop a simple, chemical mimic of a well-known enzyme, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH).
The enzyme, a large, complex protein, catalyses or accelerates a reaction in glycolysis, a biochemical pathway for harvesting energy from carbohydrates. Connon has no direct interest in glycolysis, but he is focusing on an intermediate state - "a thioester" - GAPDH enters when it is active.
"This thioester could be very important synthetically," Connon says. "We hope to be able to attack this thioester with many compounds not used by the enzyme."
He believes it could act as a kind of chemical springboard for generating novel reactions. To do so, Connon's group will develop "a stripped-down version" of GADPH, based on a precise understanding of its active site.
"It's the bare bones of the enzyme, the parts that do the chemistry," he says. By tweaking the structure of this rudimentary artificial catalyst, which will consist of only three simple components, he should be able to subtly alter the reactions it can catalyse. "We can hopefully tune the properties of the artificial enzyme exquisitely."
Connon's work is part of a wider field known as organocatalysis, which involves the development of catalysts using simple organic molecules, a concept that has been around for over a century. "In the last 10 years, it's gone from relative obscurity to the forefront of organic chemistry," he says.
TCD is not the only institution on the island to be represented in the ERC programme. Cathy Craig of the psychology department at Queen's University, Belfast, has also secured a grant. John Laffey, head of the department of anaesthesia at NUI Galway, also looks likely to gain funding.
The ERC has said it will fund about 300 projects from the current round, and Laffey's proposal was ranked 214 out of the 559 projects shortlisted, which were culled from 8,794 peer-review proposals.
The selection process was "brutally competitive", says Graham Love at Science Foundation Ireland, who is this country's national delegate to the ERC. Because of the low success rate, only the best ideas will receive funding.
The ERC's programmes will therefore, in time, become an important yardstick for measuring the quality of Irish research. "If we're putting all this money in, and we can't win some of the ERC grants, it would raise questions about what we're doing," says Love.
Cormac Sheridan