The University of California, Davis received a $750,000 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) project grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The grant, awarded on September 15, 2024, supports a 3-year research project to characterize the population diversity and environmental persistence of Ralstonia plant pathogens that cause bacterial wilt disease in major American food crops like potato, tomato, banana, and peanut. The project will involve collecting and...
The University of California, Davis has been awarded a $300,000 Project Grant under the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) to conduct research on how microbial warfare leads to the ecological success of plant pathogens. This 5-year "IGNITE Career Project" will shed light on devastating wilt diseases that impact major food crops like potato, tomato, banana, and peanut. The project leverages innovative computational and synthetic...
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) received a $120,000 Project Grant award from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) federal grant program. The award will fund research from June 2023 through May 2025 to identify ubiquitin ligase (E3) enzymes and E3 protein targets involved in plant immunity pathways. The research aims to characterize the mechanisms by which E3 enzymes...
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) was awarded a $650,000 Project Grant under the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program to elucidate the biosynthesis and ecological importance of anti-herbivory acylhexoses in the Solanaceae plant family. The research will combine plant biochemistry, analytical chemistry, plant transformation, and plant-insect interaction studies to provide a fundamental understanding of the molecular...
This $180,000 Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310) aims to advance the understanding of Clavibacter, a genus of gram-positive, xylem-colonizing bacteria that includes important plant pathogens. The project will identify and characterize a receptor for a Clavibacter-secreted effector, marking the discovery of the first plant receptor for a gram-positive bacterium. It will...
This Project Grant, awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310), will support research aimed at understanding plant immune recognition and response to the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae. The $958,480 award to the University of California, Berkeley, will fund a 3-year project to investigate how wild tomato plants recognize the pathogen's needle-like syringe, which is used to inject effector proteins that...
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) received a $906,707 Project Grant award from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant period is from May 15, 2023 through May 14, 2026. Under the award, UC Davis will provide mechanistic insights into the chemical ecology of plant root microbiomes. The university will define the chemical specificities of bacterial...
The Regents of the University of California at Riverside received a $649,990 Project Grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant, effective July 1, 2024, supports research to understand how plant pathogens called Liberibacters evade and suppress plant immune responses. The project aims to generate knowledge about Liberibacter effector proteins and their mechanisms of altering plant immunity,...
This $180,000 Project Grant awarded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program supports research to understand how the bacterial wilt pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum survives in water. The University of California, Davis is conducting high-throughput genetic screening to identify the genes that enable this pathogen to persist in aquatic environments, with the goal of developing new management strategies to...
The University of California, Davis will receive $610,766 under a three-year Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The grant is part of the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program. The university will define new control options for non-culturable foodborne pathogens like Salmonella and Listeria. Researchers will investigate how genome diversity, gene expression regulation, and induced evolution...