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...
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...
The University of California, Davis has been awarded a $225,000 Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant program. The funding will support research to investigate target genes that contribute to the growth of pathogenic bacteria inside plant hosts, with the goal of developing control strategies to limit the spread and severity of bacterial plant diseases. This research, taking place from June 1, 2024 to September 14,...
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 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 $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...
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...
This federal Project Grant award of $740,000 from the USDA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program supports the development of a dynamic in-field phenotyping system to monitor disease-related traits in tomato plants across multiple scales and environments. The goal is to expedite genomic research and improve disease-management strategies for crop production. The project will be conducted by North Carolina State University, a prominent USDA contractor and grantee, over a...
The University of California, Davis was awarded a $180,000 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) federal grant program (CFDA 10.310). The grant will fund research to determine how the interactome of the tomato brown rugose fruit virus movement protein impacts pathogenicity and immunity evasion in tomatoes. The university will use biochemical, cellular, and genetic...
This Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) provides $682,500 to Texas A&M AgriLife Research to identify bacterial effectors from plant pathogens transmitted by psyllid insects, and evaluate their role in infecting plants and arthropod vectors. The goal is to develop new control strategies that disrupt pathogen transmission and plant infection. This original research will study the parallel...