Project Grant 2030146

This National Science Foundation Project Grant of $193,119 will fund research to advance understanding of soil fungal biodiversity patterns across North America. Leveraging two extensive DNA sequencing datasets from the National Ecological Observatory Network and Dimensions of Biodiversity Project on North American Soil Fungi, the University of Michigan team will apply novel modeling techniques to identify key environmental variables influencing fungal community composition and geographic...

This $500,000 Project Grant 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 supports research to advance the understanding of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis between plants and fungi. The project aims to provide a mechanistic understanding of phosphate transport and its role in regulating this nutritionally-based mutualism, which has significant implications for...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB) FY 2023 award, funded under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), supports research and training focused on exploring the rules of life governing interactions between genomes, environment, and phenotypes in a plant-fungal symbiosis. The $240,000 award will fund a 3-year project that aims to identify the genetic regulation occurring across plant and fungal species to understand how their...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology awarded a $838,678 Project Grant to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to conduct collaborative research on the mechanisms of functional diversity maintenance in tree-ectomycorrhizal mutualisms. The project, which runs from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2027, will test the hypothesis that trees maintain a diverse portfolio of fungal partners as a form of "bet-hedging" to adapt to environmental...

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, totaling $254,466, will fund collaborative research between the United States and China from September 1, 2022 through August 31, 2024. The research is being conducted under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074), which supports increasing scientific knowledge and understanding of major biological problems. Specifically, the award will support a comparative study of the functional...

This $344,201 National Science Foundation project grant supports research into seed-fungal interactions and their influence on tropical tree recruitment. Specifically, the Utah State University-led collaborative effort will examine how seed chemistry impacts susceptibility to fungal infection and pathogenicity. It will also explore how the physical environment and maternal genotype influence fungal community composition and host susceptibility across landscape scales in Panama. Combining...

This $1,000,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to study the fundamental genetic mechanisms underlying arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis - the beneficial relationship between plants and a type of fungi that assists plants in nutrient absorption. The key objectives are to identify the core set of genes and cellular processes essential for successful AM...

This $549,948 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research conducted by the University of California, Berkeley to study the metabolites and nutrient dynamics of mutualistic fungi that form symbiotic relationships with loblolly pine trees. The key objectives are to: Identify the bioactive compounds made by the fungi that are used to defend against competitors, and determine the cost of producing these compounds....

This two-year Project Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Biological Infrastructure provides $138,000 to fund research titled "How Spatial and Temporal Variation in Environment and Soil Fungal Diversity Shapes Plant Phenotypes." The grant is part of NSF's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), which aims to promote progress in the biological sciences and strengthen the national scientific enterprise through increased knowledge and understanding of major...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support a collaborative research project to develop functional pangenomic and machine learning tools for exploring genetic diversity in plants. The $1,346,558 grant, awarded on October 1, 2024, will enable the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), a non-profit research institute, to create a modular software tool that will help scientists study genetic diversity in various...