New styles for changing womb

FASHION designer Helen Storey and her sister Kate, a developmental biologist based at Oxford University, have been granted Pounds 25,000 to produce clothes which express key events in the development of the human embryo, writes Kam Patel.

The designs will be presented during London Fashion Week and the sisters plan to record their collaboration in a joint public diary.

The award is part of a new scheme by the Wellcome Trust to enable scientists and artists to work together to create works of art.

Six projects are to be funded in the Trust's first wave of "Sci-Art" awards totalling Pounds 90,000.

Another will investigate "phantom limbs" experienced by a number of patients who have had limbs amputated but still feel they are there. Doctors John Kew and Peter Halligan will work with artist Alexa Wright to create a visual record of each patient's changing sense of their own phantom limbs.

Installations of "grass canvases" made by projecting images and shadows onto a unique stay-green grass will be the theme of another project worth Pounds 15,000.

The Trust has also funded cash to Peter Barnham of Bristol University and the artist and broadcaster Leslie Forbes to explore the concept "you are what you eat".