The Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded a $700,000 Project Grant under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to conduct research on cassava mosaic disease (CMD) resistance. The 3-year project aims to reveal the molecular mechanisms behind the natural genetic resistance to CMD found in certain cassava varieties. The research will explore how this resistance mechanism can be leveraged to...
This federal Project Grant award of $1,192,499.00 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Missouri to develop epigenetic editing tools for crop improvement. The key objectives of this 4-year project are to: 1) Expand epigenetic editing technologies to other crop species beyond cassava, such as rice and tomato, to enable disease resistance; 2) Demonstrate additional applications of...
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 Project Grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), aims to develop novel methods for plant genome editing using the parasitic plant Cuscuta campestris (dodder). The $450,000 award, effective July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2027, will enable researchers at the University of Missouri System to: Achieve stable transformation of dodder to enable its use in host gene editing; Develop a dodder protoplast system for rapid screening of...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $300,000 in funding to Western University of Health Sciences to conduct collaborative research on the variability and regulation of the plant polyadenylation complex. The research aims to better understand how this complex mediates gene expression and plant responses to environmental and developmental cues, with the goal of improving our knowledge of crop plant growth,...
This $3 million National Science Foundation Project Grant under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research at the University of Illinois exploring the genetic and mechanistic bases of quantitative disease resistance in maize. The research aims to improve understanding of quantitative disease resistance at multiple levels, from genes to tradeoffs at the whole plant level, focusing on some of the most important diseases of corn. A subaward of approximately...
This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $750,000 to the University of Missouri System from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2026. The grant supports collaborative research among multiple institutions to elucidate the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying nonhost resistance in plants. Nonhost resistance confers broad immunity to most plant species against pathogens that can infect other species. The research aims to...
This $2.18 million Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research at Rutgers University from September 1, 2023 through August 31, 2027 to test the use of multispectral imaging technology for detecting cassava brown streak disease. The imaging technology will be deployed in agricultural fields in Tanzania to rapidly determine cassava plant infection status. Rutgers University will receive funding to assess the technology's...
This $314,560 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Emerging Frontiers under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports collaborative research by Purdue University to develop crop varieties that enhance agricultural sustainability. The key objectives are to: Identify genetic targets underlying microbiome-mediated genetic resistance to major current and emergent biotic and abiotic stresses in three widely-grown crops - wheat, tomato, and poplar...
This $836,100 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Activities program (CFDA 47.083) supports research on the genetic mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interactions in the bacterial wilt pathosystem affecting cucurbit crops. The project, led by Tennessee State University, aims to screen and characterize natural resistance traits in cucumber and melon populations, leveraging genomic approaches and functional genomics analysis to advance sustainable disease...