This $699,870 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports the development of simplified and highly efficient genetic modification technologies for economically important grasses and cereal crops. The "PLANTTRANSFORM: SMART GRASS" project aims to overcome the current constraint in the plant science research community regarding the capacity to genetically modify major crop plants. The award establishes a...
This $794,457 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support the development of new genetic analysis tools. The goal is to incorporate molecular and cellular biology knowledge, such as gene expression patterns and regulatory networks, directly into statistical models used to map genes, predict traits, and simulate changes in the genotype-to-phenotype relationships. The research will be conducted using simulated...
This Project Grant award, valued at $250,000.00, was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under its Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program. The award supports research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to dissect the molecular mechanisms controlling spikelet development and inflorescence architecture in panicoid cereal crops such as corn, wheat, and rice. The project aims to leverage the model plant Setaria viridis to rapidly discover the genetic and hormonal control...
This $180,000 Project Grant awarded by the Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (AFRI CFDA 10.310) to Colorado State University (CSU) aims to address two key questions related to disease resistance genes in plants. The first objective is to determine the function of a class of disease resistance proteins that are abundant in dicot plant species (e.g. vegetables, fruits) but present as a single gene in many monocot genomes (e.g. cereals, grains). This will be...
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 $225,000 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) aims to engineer improved plant genetic engineering capabilities. The key objectives are to: Develop a toolkit for making modifications to various Agrobacterium strains, including those commonly used and novel wild-type strains, to enhance the efficiency and applicability of plant genetic engineering processes....
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 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 Project Grant award from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture provides $1.19 million to fund research at the University of Nebraska from March 1, 2022 to February 28, 2026. The award is made under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program (AFRI, CFDA #10.310), which supports fundamental and applied research, extension, and education addressing food and agricultural sciences. Specifically, the University of...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $953,779 Project Grant under the Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program to the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska to develop innovative data processing and advanced visualization tools for optimizing maize canopy architecture. The goal is to create a "digital twin" of maize plants that can simulate real plant growth and response to the environment. This will allow researchers to experiment with different plant traits and...
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 specific non-coding sequences through genome editing in model grass species. This research seeks to unveil principles for enhancing crop plants by precisely editing regulatory DNA elements, with the goal of improving agricultural productivity and sustainability. The award was granted to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and will span from September 2024 to August 2028.