The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded a $225,000 Project Grant under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310) to North Carolina State University to investigate disease resistance in populations of maize landraces and teosinte, the wild relative of maize. The project aims to describe genetic variation for disease resistance, perform genome-wide association analysis to identify resistance alleles, measure resistance components, and analyze the...
This $3 million National Science Foundation Project Grant under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research at the University of Illinois exploring the genetic and mechanistic bases of quantitative disease resistance in maize. The research aims to improve understanding of quantitative disease resistance at multiple levels, from genes to tradeoffs at the whole plant level, focusing on some of the most important diseases of corn. A subaward of approximately...
This $180,000 Project Grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310). The overall goal of this 3-year project is to identify genes related to vein initiation and spacing in the leaves of corn. To achieve this, the project will use three approaches: a genome-wide association study to associate vein density measurements with genetic variation,...
This Project Grant award of $849,999 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI, CFDA 10.310) supports research to understand how the plant immune system regulates assembly of the leaf microbiome and how the microbiome modulates plant health and resistance to pathogens, using rice and bacterial blight as a model system. Key objectives include identifying rice genes that influence leaf microbiome assembly during disease...
This $600,000 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (AFRI program, CFDA 10.310) aims to identify the specific antimicrobial molecules produced by the beneficial bacterium Pseudomonas protegens PBL3 and understand how they inhibit the growth of a pathogenic bacterium that causes a devastating disease in rice crops. The goal is to develop biologically-based solutions to control crop diseases and reduce losses, thereby alleviating...
This $225,000 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program aims to uncover the role of non-coding DNA sequences in regulating agronomic traits, using the grass awn as a model. The research will focus on three key objectives: 1) Identifying putative regulatory DNA elements across grass genomes, 2) Associating variation in these conserved non-coding sequences with awn traits, and 3) Dissecting the function of...
The federal Project Grant award, funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310), is supporting research at Colorado State University to develop innovative methods to address herbicide resistance in problematic weeds. The $294,000 award, effective from August 1, 2024 to July 31, 2027, aims to produce research outcomes that can be applied to reverse herbicide resistance in weeds such as Palmer amaranth...
This $180,000 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program supports research by the Regents of the University of California at Riverside to identify and re-engineer genes involved in environmental stress tolerance in plants. The goal is to cultivate higher-yielding, climate-resilient crop varieties that can sustainably meet the food demands of a growing...
This $2,500,000 Project Grant was awarded by the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant supports research to evaluate the potential for using mixed species plant communities and breeding for genetic resistance as strategies to manage plant pathogens in perennial agricultural systems. Key objectives include developing a mathematical framework to predict pathogen dilution effects and impacts on productivity, as...
This $180,000 federal Project Grant awarded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI, CFDA 10.310) will support research at The Pennsylvania State University to investigate plant host resistance against the invasive swede midge pest in cole crops such as broccoli and cabbage. The key objectives are to: (1) identify differences in defense mechanisms between broccoli cultivars, (2) assess resistance/susceptibility across...