Project Grant 201033522217151

This collaborative research project, funded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Integrative Organismal Systems under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), awarded $451,139 to the University of South Carolina beginning July 1, 2025, and concluding June 30, 2028. The project develops innovative biotechnology utilizing transposable elements (TEs)—mobile DNA fragments that naturally reshuffle genome segments—to enable intragenic genome engineering. Rather than introducing...

This three-year, $1.8 million project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems aims to develop rapid transformation and gene editing techniques in maize through the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074). The University of Missouri System will work to establish a system for precisely inserting transgenes and editing genes at predetermined sites in the genome of maize. Researchers will create "landing pads" on five chromosomes of a...

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $2,379,217 to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center from March 1, 2022 to February 28, 2025. The grant supports research to develop targeted DNA integration techniques in plants. Specifically, the Center and its sub-awardees—the University of South Carolina Aiken Campus and University of Missouri—will work to engineer hyperactive versions of the Pong transposase proteins and...

This federal Project Grant award of $1,638,033, provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the Biomedical Research and Research Training Program (CFDA 93.859), supports the development of a CRISPR-free mammalian recombineering system at the Scripps Research Institute. The project aims to characterize and optimize a bacterial recombinase system for efficiently conducting large-scale DNA insertions, deletions, and substitutions in mammalian cells without inducing cytotoxic...

The National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems awarded $876,250 to the University of California, Berkeley on October 1, 2025, under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to develop epigenetic editing methods for crop improvement. The project, running through April 30, 2028 and performed at Berkeley, California, expands genome-editing capabilities to include epigenetic editing—modifying gene expression without changing DNA sequence—to enable novel agronomic...

This $322,020 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Integrative Organismal Systems will support collaborative research at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to develop improved methods for CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing in maize. The key objectives are to generate maize lines expressing high levels of Cas9 nuclease and to engineer and optimize viral vectors to efficiently deliver guide RNAs for both somatic and heritable gene editing. This...

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems, under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074), provides $298,102 to the University of California, Davis for research entitled "EAGER: Targeted and Specific Elimination of Plant Chromosomes." The two-year award beginning April 1, 2023 supports development of new genome editing techniques using CRISPR to enable targeted elimination of specific plant chromosomes at...

The National Science Foundation awarded a $307,400 Project Grant under its Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to the University of Missouri System to develop epigenetic editing tools for improving crop plants. The project aims to expand the capabilities of genome editing by enabling targeted changes in gene expression, rather than just DNA sequence, to generate novel traits in important crops like rice and tomato. Key objectives include adapting the epigenetic editing approach...

Acrigen Biosciences, Inc. was awarded a $1,000,000 cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to develop a curative gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy. Over the two year period from March 2022 to February 2024, Acrigen will engineer an anti-CRISPR protein to increase the precision and safety of CRISPR-Cas gene editing. They will pair this with a novel CRISPR nuclease and validate the system for editing and disease correction in...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded Clemson University $588,000 on September 1, 2026, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) to develop improved methods for regenerating cotton plants from elite and commercial varieties used by growers. The research will test controlled combinations of natural plant-development genes across diverse cotton varieties to identify which treatments reliably cause modified cells to form embryos and...