Project Grant 1134877

This Project Grant award of $270,000 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund a 3-year postdoctoral research fellowship beginning in July 2025. The research will investigate the microbial ecology and environmental adaptations of a recently discovered multicellular choanoflagellate species, Barroeca monosierra, isolated from Mono Lake, California. The project aims to provide insights into how environmental forces may have shaped the early...

This $1,050,000 Project Grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), aims to study how extreme environments shape the regulatory networks of transcription in microbes called archaea. The research project, conducted by Duke University, will focus on haloarchaea - a group of archaea that thrive in extremely salty environments. The project's key objectives are to: (1) use genetics, genomics, and statistical modeling to compare the architecture...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research to comprehensively characterize the hidden diversity of Gloeobacteria, an enigmatic lineage of cyanobacteria critical for understanding the early evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. The $522,583 award to the University of California, Davis aims to: 1) isolate new Gloeobacteria cultures through targeted fieldwork and real-time sequencing, 2) characterize the genomic,...

This three-year, $811,924 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology and Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund collaborative research on the phylogenomics and taxonomic revision of the diatom order Rhopalodiales. The research team, comprised of scientists from three U.S. universities and seven international institutions, will gather genomic and morphological data to address the evolutionary origins and diversification of Rhopalodiales,...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $299,968 EAGER (Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) grant to Portland State University (PSU) for the project "Fertilizing the Tree of Life with Novel Taxa from Deep-Sea Vent Microbial Metagenomes Collected Over Time and Space". The grant supports research to characterize the spatial and temporal genomic diversity of microbes found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The project will...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $665,885 to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) to conduct collaborative research on the evolution of acquired phototrophy in Mesodinium ciliates. The key products and services to be delivered under this 3-year award, which began on March 1, 2024, include: Comparative studies of the cellular, metabolic, and genetic adaptations across a genus of Mesodinium ciliates that...

This three-year, $317,027 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support collaborative research on the phylogenomics and taxonomic revision of the diatom order Rhopalodiales. The research team, consisting of scientists from three U.S. universities and seven international institutions, will gather genomic and morphological data to address the evolutionary origins and diversification of Rhopalodiales. They will seek to determine when the...

The University of Oregon was awarded a $399,999 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology to pursue the PURSUIT project. The project aims to uncover previously undiscovered bacterial and archaeal diversity in hot springs across the US Great Basin through culture-independent metagenomics of 40 geothermal sites. The University will recover novel prokaryotic genomes at whole resolution and taxonomically classify and functionally annotate recovered...

The Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences will develop a novel microencapsulation-based technology for whole genome sequencing of RNA viruses from ocean environments under a two-year, $599,048 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences' Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050). The laboratory aims to address the pressing need for direct quantification methods for small RNA viruses in marine samples, which play a major role in microbial ecology and evolution but are...

This three-year, $387,240 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support improvements to FAPROTAX, a popular database and computational tool for predicting the metabolic functions encoded by prokaryotic taxa in microbiome surveys. FAPROTAX2 will incorporate additional experimental evidence from literature, redefine metabolic functions consistently with the Metacyc pathway database, include phenotypic data from thousands of...