This $650,000 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA #10.310) will fund research at Marquette University to improve cold stress tolerance in rice. Principal Investigator Dr. Michael Schlüppi and co-PIs Dr. Georgia Eizenga of the USDA Agricultural Research Service and Dr. Jeremy Edwards will utilize rice diversity panels and mapping populations to identify genetic...
This three-year, $648,640 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) competitive grants program (CFDA 10.310) will fund research at Dartmouth College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the role of the plant hormone cytokinin in regulating rice plant resistance to drought and salt stress. Dartmouth researchers will generate and characterize...
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) within the United States Department of Agriculture awarded a $10,000,000 Project Grant under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) federal grant program to the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center (LSU Agricultural Center) on April 1, 2023 with a projected completion date of March 31, 2027. The grant aims to develop climate-resilient innovations to sustainably produce rice in the southern U.S. through a multi-state,...
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...
The University of Nebraska received a $649,997 Project Grant from the USDA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant, awarded on July 1, 2024, will fund research to elucidate the physiological and molecular mechanisms of high nighttime temperature (HNT) tolerance for improving rice grain yield and quality. The project aims to leverage recently discovered rice genes that contribute to natural variation in grain size and weight under HNT stress, a growing problem...
This $720,494 Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program aims to improve the productivity, quality, and nutritional traits of rice under heat stress. The key objectives are to: 1) phenotype a novel "Heat-MAGIC" rice population to quantify the impacts of heat stress on yield, grain quality, and nutrition; 2) map genetic loci associated with heat tolerance; and 3) characterize favorable...
The Division of Agriculture of the University of Arkansas received a $585,650 Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The objective of this 4-year award is to identify genes and quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that confer tolerance to high nighttime temperatures (HNT) in rice, which can significantly impact yield and quality. The researchers will use genome-wide association studies and QTL mapping...
The South Dakota State University was awarded a $799,810 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant will fund research from March 1, 2023 to February 28, 2027 to balance seed dormancy in rice crops through genetic manipulation. Specifically, the university will model balancing selection for three genes (SD12A, SD12B, SD12C) associated with rice embryo dormancy....
The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Division, was awarded a $300,000 Project Grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant project, awarded on July 1, 2024, with a completion date of June 30, 2026, aims to investigate the variation in volatile and non-volatile profiles across a variety of rice cultivars from U.S. breeding programs, the USDA-ARS world rice collection, and genetically...
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...