The National Science Foundation awarded a $1,031,115 project grant to the Regents of the University of Michigan under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074) to develop new machine learning approaches for analyzing fossil and living plant species data. The grant aims to generate a large morphological dataset for flowering plants using novel machine learning methods and develop new statistical methods for modeling evolution. Researchers will use these advances in data...
This $341,473 Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), supports research to develop new methods for measuring plant traits using leaf spectroscopy on herbarium specimens. The primary objective is to enable large-scale assessments of how plant functional traits and their combinations have evolved across different biomes, such as rainforests, savannas, and deserts. The research will generate new phylogenetic data and...
This $431,424 National Science Foundation project grant, awarded under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), will fund research at the University of Kentucky to advance understanding of plant diversification processes in the tropical Andes mountains. The research team will develop new genomic analysis software and mathematical models to disentangle the biological and environmental drivers of diversification among four groups of flowering plants endemic to the region. They will...
This $377,731 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) aims to employ machine learning and multi-omics approaches to predict protein functions in the model plant system Arabidopsis. The primary recipient, Clemson University, will generate diverse co-expression networks from transcriptome data, integrate them with transcription factor-target and protein-protein interaction networks, and apply deep learning to perform genome-wide gene...
The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania received a $526,084 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems. The grant is part of the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to promote progress in the biological sciences. Under the award, the University will conduct collaborative research to predict plant phenotypes from molecular profiles using topological data analysis and deep learning. Researchers will use X-ray computed tomography to...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program aims to develop advanced computational tools and methods for analyzing genetic diversity in plants, particularly as a means to understand and address the impacts of climate change. With total funding of $1,346,558 over a 4-year period from October 2024 to September 2028, the project will be conducted by the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), a non-profit research institute in...
This two-year, $276,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation will fund research investigating the early stages of species diversification. The awardee will conduct integrative research examining how an organism's local environment shapes the evolution of its physical traits and genetic makeup. Specifically, the awardee will characterize incipient divergence among flowering plants by examining floral trait variation in the recently radiating Castilleja genus. Genomic and...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports the development of new computational tools for analyzing single-cell genomic data across diverse plant species. The $1,180,752 award to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University aims to address key challenges in plant single-cell transcriptomics, including determining known and novel cell types, enabling cross-species comparisons, and overcoming the lack of curated...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology awarded a $799,458 Project Grant to the University of Florida (UF) for the 3-year period from January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2026. The grant is part of NSF's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) and will fund collaborative research to integrate plant traits, phylogenies, and distributional data to forecast the risks and resilience of North American plant communities in response to climate and land use changes. The...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) Project Grant, awarded to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, provides $396,677 in funding to investigate the early history and evolution of tropical forests in South America during the Early Cretaceous period, approximately 100-145 million years ago. The research focuses on analyzing exceptionally well-preserved plant fossils from Colombia and Ecuador to reconstruct the composition and...