Project Grant 201333522210971

The University of Arizona was awarded a $500,000 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program. The three-year grant will fund research into the genetic factors influencing seed development in Brassica rapa, a close relative of canola. The grantee has previously identified B. rapa mutants lacking RNA-directed DNA methylation that exhibit severe reductions in...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded $749,951 to Texas A&M Agrilife Research on December 15, 2025, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program to develop genetically modified cotton lines with altered sterol profiles as a novel pest control strategy targeting plant-feeding insects that depend on sterols from host plants. The project generates and screens stably transformed CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi cotton lines with modified sterol...

This $249,000 National Science Foundation project grant funds the development of computational and experimental tools to engineer gene expression in rice. Funded under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), the award supports a postdoctoral fellowship held by David Ding at the University of California, Berkeley from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2026. The fellow will create a pipeline to understand regulatory mutations in plants at scale, coupled with high-throughput experimental assays. A...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded South Dakota State University $644,000 on September 15, 2026, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Foundational and Applied Science Program to conduct molecular genetics research on seed dormancy and germination in rice. The project identifies regulatory roles of the gibberellin signaling pathway in seed dormancy and germination by evaluating genic effects of key genes (SLR1, GID1, GID2) on...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded $299,544 to the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station on February 1, 2026, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program to investigate RNA interference (RNAi) as a fungal disease control mechanism in soybeans. The research addresses knowledge gaps in the intraspecies susceptibility of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum to RNAi and the durability of this technology across multiple pathogen...

The University of California, Riverside received a $180,000 Project Grant award from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program. The three-year award will support research examining the genetic regulatory networks controlling the development of suberized transport barriers in rice root cells, which show plasticity in response to water stress. Understanding these networks...

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...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded The Pennsylvania State University $799,788 under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) on November 15, 2025, to identify and characterize six genes that enhance rice tolerance to heat and drought stress. The recipient will screen and phenotype 200 traditional rice landraces carrying wild-type or variant versions of target genes, assessing yield and seed quality under both optimal and adverse...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded $749,921 to the University of Maryland, College Park on March 1, 2026, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI, CFDA 10.310) to investigate mechanisms of pest resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis toxins in genetically modified crops and develop monitoring frameworks to improve transgenic crop durability. The research identifies and evaluates a gene copy number variant (CNV) linked to Bt resistance...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program provides $500,000 from March 2024 through February 2027 to researchers at the University of Maryland and Silvec Biologics, Inc. to develop methods to stabilize RNA genomes in viruses that can be used as therapies to treat plant diseases. The project aims to use computational approaches, including artificial intelligence, to design RNA structures that can be inserted into virus genomes to increase...