Antibiotics from the medieval medicine cabinet

Hello all,

A couple of you have asked why we are crowdfunding for a small amount rather than being backed by government or private funding. We did the initial research on this topic (a fair amount of lab work) on a £5,000 sandpit grant that we were awarded by the University of Nottingham's Interdisciplinary Centre for Analytical Science. We then applied for research council (government) funding but were not successful. We are working on new applications for research council funding that will cover a substantial amount of work and pay for salaried research posts. In the meantime, we wanted to try crowdfunding for two reasons. First, having the money to be able to get a summer student will be vastly helpful to us - an extra pair of hands will allow us to do more lab work towards a research council grant application (showing preliminary data always makes for a stronger application). Second, if we can demonstrate to a research council that members of the public have freely chosen to support our project then this should help to show that our work could have significant impact - and hopefully make our case for funding stronger. We can't use the grants on which we are employed to support this work, because they are tied to specific research projects. (We have been working on this around our main projects). So we think that this crowdfunder could be a stepping stone to something bigger and more long term - once again, you are all awesome for helping us work towards this.