This $1,088,678 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports collaborative research at Rutgers, The State University to develop improved methods for transforming and regenerating recalcitrant plant species, with a focus on maize. The project aims to provide a thorough understanding of the molecular events enabling plant regeneration from differentiated tissue by exploiting a "GGB" morphogenic-based system. This...
This $2,841,262 federal Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research at Oregon State University (OSU) to leverage the natural diversity of Agrobacterium bacteria to enhance genetic transformation and regeneration capabilities in woody plant species, with a focus on the economically important poplar. The key objectives are to screen ~100 novel Agrobacterium strains, analyze the genetic factors underlying high...
This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $2,379,217 to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center from March 1, 2022 to February 28, 2025. The grant supports research to develop targeted DNA integration techniques in plants. Specifically, the Center and its sub-awardees—the University of South Carolina Aiken Campus and University of Missouri—will work to engineer hyperactive versions of the Pong transposase proteins and...
This $699,870 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports the development of simplified and highly efficient genetic modification technologies for economically important grasses and cereal crops. The "PLANTTRANSFORM: SMART GRASS" project aims to overcome the current constraint in the plant science research community regarding the capacity to genetically modify major crop plants. The award establishes a...
This National Science Foundation Project Grant of $532,603 awarded to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center on October 1, 2021 will fund research into the role of chloroplast signaling in regulating plasmodesmata. The goal is to identify chloroplast signals that change nuclear gene expression and define nuclear gene networks and signaling modules that alter plasmodesmata structure and function. The research will use reverse genetics, bioinformatics, molecular and biochemical approaches, and...
This $800,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support research at Colorado State University to investigate the effects of holoparasitism on plant organellar translation and tRNA metabolism. The research will analyze how the loss of photosynthesis and parasitic lifestyle of holoparasitic plants impacts the bacterial-like translation machinery in plant mitochondria and...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant award under the Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program provides funding of $993,190 to the University of Maine System to conduct research focused on engineering stable, transmissible plant minichromosomes for synthetic biology applications. The project, titled "NSF-DBT: PLANTSYNBIO: PLANT MINICHROMOSOME ENGINEERING", aims to develop methods that expand the limits of plant minichromosome size, structure, and composition to create a...
The National Science Foundation awarded a $999,220 project grant to the University of Oregon on March 15, 2021 with a completion date of February 29, 2024. The grant falls under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to promote progress in the biological sciences and strengthen the nation's scientific enterprise through increasing knowledge and understanding of major problems. Specifically, the grant funds the "PLANTSYNBIO" project to develop regulatory systems for tuning gene...
This $524,852 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) to develop improved methods for plant transformation and regeneration in maize and other recalcitrant crop species. The project aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying plant regeneration through the use of morphogenic factors, with the goal of...
This $225,000 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) aims to engineer improved plant genetic engineering capabilities. The key objectives are to: Develop a toolkit for making modifications to various Agrobacterium strains, including those commonly used and novel wild-type strains, to enhance the efficiency and applicability of plant genetic engineering processes....