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 $1,211,545 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (CFDA 47.074 - Biological Sciences) will support the development of advanced Prime Editing (PE) systems in rice, tomato, and poplar plants. Prime Editing is a novel and highly versatile CRISPR-based gene editing technology that enables precise genome modifications. The key objectives of this 3-year project are to optimize Prime Editor proteins to increase their activity and editing efficiency, improve pegRNA structure and...
This $725,512 project grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) aims to develop highly efficient and robust prime editing systems in rice, tomato, and poplar plants. Prime editing is an advanced CRISPR/Cas gene editing technology that enables precise gene modifications, offering significant advantages over conventional CRISPR approaches. The project will optimize prime editor proteins, improve prime editor guide RNA structures and...
This three-year, $1.8 million project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems aims to develop rapid transformation and gene editing techniques in maize through the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074). The University of Missouri System will work to establish a system for precisely inserting transgenes and editing genes at predetermined sites in the genome of maize. Researchers will create "landing pads" on five chromosomes of a...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Integrative Organismal Systems awarded a $277,978 Project Grant under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to the University of California, Berkeley. The 3-year grant, beginning on Sep 1, 2023, aims to develop new tools and resources to enable more efficient gene editing in maize, the world's most produced crop. Specifically, the project will generate maize lines that constitutively express the Cas9 gene editing enzyme and engineer...
This $322,020 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Integrative Organismal Systems will support collaborative research at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to develop improved methods for CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing in maize. The key objectives are to generate maize lines expressing high levels of Cas9 nuclease and to engineer and optimize viral vectors to efficiently deliver guide RNAs for both somatic and heritable gene editing. This...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $800,000 Project Grant under its Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to The Regents of the University of California, doing business as University of California, Berkeley. The grant funding will support collaborative research to discover and characterize compact CRISPR gene editing systems that can be encoded in plant viruses. This will enable more efficient and widespread deployment of genome editing capabilities across a variety of crop...
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...
The National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program awarded a $1,200,000 project grant to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Office of Research Administration to discover and characterize small CRISPR genome editing systems for virus-based delivery into plants. This 3-year project aims to develop new tools to enhance plant breeding and create crops with higher yields, drought resistance, and pest/temperature tolerance. The work includes screening metagenomic data to...
This $500,000 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research (BRAG) program (CFDA #10.219) will fund a study of the unintended effects of CRISPR/Dcas-mediated editing of DNA methylation in tomato conducted by the University of Connecticut from September 2021 through August 2025. The project aims to use CRISPR/Dcas technology to produce site-specific DNA methylation-edited tomato plants...