The phrase "a handful of functional" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a small number of items or elements that are operational or effective in some way.
Example: "In the project, we only had a handful of functional prototypes that met the required specifications."
Alternatives: "a few operational" or "a small number of effective".
The selected genes he has detected fall into a handful of functional categories, as might be expected if people were adapting to specific changes in their environment.
A handful of functional neuroimaging studies suggest that systematic diurnal variation exists in brain activity related to other functions, but no published human studies have examined daily variation in the neural processing of reward.
There have been a handful of functional connectivity studies of schizophrenia [26], [27], [28], but none have specifically examined working memory.
In animals, a handful of functional micropeptides have also been discovered.
Further analysis revealed that genes exhibiting each of these patterns also fell within a handful of functional categories (genes marked in Figure 2c) suggesting a role for AfsS in coordinating those functions.
Though a handful of functional MRI (fMRI) studies have implicated frontal pole activity in response to antidepressant interventions [ 34, 35], few morphometric studies of the frontal poles in MDD exist.
Sensel has seed funding and has already built a handful of sleek, functional Morph devices, but it's turning to Kickstarter in hopes of raising more money to help build it into a mass-market product.
Previous studies have looked at the association between a handful of common functional BRIP1 polymorphisms and breast cancer risk.
High reproductive skew, i.e., a highly unequal partitioning of reproduction, has as yet been described for only a handful of species ("functional monogyny"; [ 9]).
These genes represent only a handful of the list of functional candidate genes for PD, but their implication in PD at least supports the pathophysiological significance of mitochondrial dysfunction to PD.
Despite the Standing Committee's actions, democracy advocates still could win a majority of the legislature's seats in the September elections by taking almost all of the publicly elected seats plus a handful of seats in certain functional constituencies.
