Project Grant 2031102

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $900,000 to Northeastern University to develop a novel bioreactor system for studying microbial communities. The project, titled "Synthetic Ecology of Mixed Aerobic/Anaerobic Microbial Consortia", aims to create a low-cost, scalable bioreactor platform that can precisely control the atmospheric gas composition across parallel microbial cultures. This system will enable...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $949,877 Project Grant to Rutgers, The State University through the Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program. The grant funds a collaborative research project to develop closed-loop control systems that integrate optogenetics and metabolite biosensing to modulate the composition and productivity of synthetic microbial communities. The project aims to advance basic research in this area and generate strategies for improved production of...

This $443,477 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems will support research and education activities at Rice University from February 1, 2023 through January 31, 2028. The project aims to advance environmental microbiome engineering for wastewater treatment and resource recovery applications. Specifically, the principal investigator will develop and validate novel strategies for harnessing horizontal gene...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program project grant awarded to William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) in the amount of $800,000 will fund the development of a high-throughput approach to build and study synthetic microbial communities. The project aims to create new methods to rapidly construct and understand the interactions within these complex communities of microbes, with the goal of identifying new sources of antibiotics and providing educational and...

This federal Project Grant award of $820,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research conducted by the University of Delaware to control the spatial arrangement and function of synthetic microbial communities. The key products and services to be delivered under this 3-year award include: Repurposing innovative biological containment tools to direct the self-assembly of specific microbes within a larger synthetic microbial community....

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program provides $509,573 to Trustees of Tufts College, doing business as Tufts University, for a 3-year research project titled "Collaborative Research: Mechanisms of Community Coalescence in Synthetic Microbiomes." The project aims to investigate how microbiomes, such as those found in fermented foods like sourdough and kombucha, reassemble and function when they mix, a phenomenon known as community...

This three-year, $673,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research into the role of ecological interactions in diversification among coexisting microbial species. The University of California, Irvine will study how commensal interactions, where one species benefits while the other is unaffected, influence the formation of new bacterial species in microbial communities. Researchers will culture bacteria in a commensal...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences awarded a $647,750 Project Grant to Princeton University under the Biological Sciences grant program (CFDA 47.074) to develop a closed-loop control system for regulating microbial communities. The project aims to integrate optogenetic controls and metabolite biosensing to dynamically modulate the composition and productivity of synthetic microbial communities for the production of valuable chemicals. The...

This collaborative research project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Emerging Frontiers under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), aims to advance understanding of soil microbiome composition and function to support sustainable agriculture. Awarded to the University of Delaware on September 1, 2025, with total funding of $562,591 through August 31, 2028, the project will deliver fundamental research outputs including identification of carbon substrate...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology awarded a $291,182 Project Grant to the University System of New Hampshire (UNH), through its University of New Hampshire division operating as the Office of Sponsored Research. The grant, part of NSF's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), will fund a collaborative research project to evaluate the potential for engineered synthetic microbial communities to help plant hosts, such as duckweed, adapt to the impacts of...