Project Grant 20203361031702

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awarded a $749,720 Project Grant under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) (CFDA 10.310) to Mississippi State University (MSU). The grant aims to understand how honey bees interact with viruses at the individual and cellular levels, with the goal of identifying genetic markers that indicate resistance to viral infections. The project will initially focus on studying the performance of...

This $750,000 Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310), will fund research to develop a new approach for protecting honey bees against viruses that threaten colony health and pollination services. The project combines expertise in engineered gut symbionts, peptide secretion systems, and honey bee physiology to continuously deliver antiviral peptides within the bee digestive tract....

This Project Grant award, with a total funding amount of $749,086, was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) to Villanova University. The project aims to address two of the USDA's Pollinator Health priorities - understanding factors that influence pollinator abundance and diversity, and developing innovative tools and management practices to support healthy pollinators. Specifically, the project will use unmanned aerial vehicles...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) awarded a $435,178 project grant to Utah State University to explore and exploit a reservoir of multi-sensor data collected from field experiments with managed honey bee colonies. The project will curate this dataset, which includes thousands of frame photographs and millions of sensor measurements, and make it publicly available to the U.S. precision apiculture community. The university will use...

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) awarded a $760,318 Project Grant under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855) to the University of California, Davis to develop recombinant enhanced antiviral sensors (REAVRS) that can broadly inhibit a range of viruses to control vector-borne and zoonotic viral diseases. The project aims to generate and optimize REAVR proteins, identify and characterize virus-inducible promoters in mosquito cells,...

This $704,499 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support research at Montana State University to investigate the impact of asymptomatic honey bee virus infections on honey bee health and flight performance. The 5-year project will conduct laboratory experiments on individual honey bees and honey bee cells to determine how virus infections and heat stress affect antiviral defense mechanisms and overall honey bee...

The University of Florida was awarded a $701,747 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture through its Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program to develop a novel environmental DNA/RNA (eDNA/eRNA) monitoring tool to improve honey bee health. The four-year award beginning May 1, 2023 will support research to determine if eRNA can detect honey bee viruses and if eDNA/eRNA can identify emerging threats to U.S. honey...

This $300,000 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) will support the development and testing of the "eBeevet" functional sensor framework designed for bee hives. The framework will utilize machine learning methods to analyze data and propose solutions to address the drastic declines in honeybee populations that have occurred over the past two decades. The project aims to create scalable data management...

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's $150,000 Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research from October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2026 to translate insights from sleep biology to improve continual learning in artificial neural networks. The University of California San Diego will study multi-phasic sleep patterns across the honeybee brain using electrophysiological experiments. This will inform computational models of sleeping neural networks to enhance deep...

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded a $180,000 Project Grant to Regents Of The University Of Minnesota under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The University will conduct research on Wolbachia bacteria and its potential to manage arthropod pests as biological control agents. Using functional genomics, proteomics, and synthetic biology methods, the University will characterize Wolbachia proteins that may alter insect...