This $1,211,545 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (CFDA 47.074 - Biological Sciences) will support the development of advanced Prime Editing (PE) systems in rice, tomato, and poplar plants. Prime Editing is a novel and highly versatile CRISPR-based gene editing technology that enables precise genome modifications. The key objectives of this 3-year project are to optimize Prime Editor proteins to increase their activity and editing efficiency, improve pegRNA structure and...
This $725,512 project grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) aims to develop highly efficient and robust prime editing systems in rice, tomato, and poplar plants. Prime editing is an advanced CRISPR/Cas gene editing technology that enables precise gene modifications, offering significant advantages over conventional CRISPR approaches. The project will optimize prime editor proteins, improve prime editor guide RNA structures and...
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...
The Regents of the University of Minnesota, through its Office of Sponsored Projects Administration, was awarded a $551,099 Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research (BRAG) program (CFDA 10.219). The grant will fund a 3-year study to investigate the potential for unintended changes due to CRISPR/Cas9 genetic modifications of multiple gene copies or gene family members in soybeans. The...
This three-year project grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program totals $647,000 to support research at the University of Maryland, College Park aimed at improving golden rice varieties. Specifically, the university will conduct genome engineering research using CRISPR tools to address limitations in the accumulation, stability, and metabolic conversion of beta-carotene in golden rice...
This federal Project Grant award of $1,192,499.00 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Missouri to develop epigenetic editing tools for crop improvement. The key objectives of this 4-year project are to: 1) Expand epigenetic editing technologies to other crop species beyond cassava, such as rice and tomato, to enable disease resistance; 2) Demonstrate additional applications of...
This $650,000 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) under the Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research Grants Program (CFDA 10.219) will fund research at Clemson University to investigate the unintended effects of commonly used site-specific recombinase genes (Cre, Flp, PhiC31) when expressed in creeping bentgrass and Arabidopsis plants. The primary objectives are to examine whether and how the recombinases may cause...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $800,000 Project Grant under its Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to The Regents of the University of California, doing business as University of California, Berkeley. The grant funding will support collaborative research to discover and characterize compact CRISPR gene editing systems that can be encoded in plant viruses. This will enable more efficient and widespread deployment of genome editing capabilities across a variety of crop...
This $649,847 Project Grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) under the Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research Grants Program (CFDA 10.219). The grant funds research to understand how pests overcome plant resistance traits conferred by engineered genes, and develop a monitoring framework to improve the durability of transgenic crops. The research focuses on characterizing the role of gene copy number variants (CNVs) in...
The University of Maryland, College Park was awarded a $1,205,836 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074) for the period of March 1, 2022 through February 28, 2025. The grant funds the development of highly efficient and unconstrained CRISPR systems for plant functional genomics. Specifically, the University will utilize the funding to advance CRISPR technology for analyzing...