This $794,457 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support the development of new genetic analysis tools. The goal is to incorporate molecular and cellular biology knowledge, such as gene expression patterns and regulatory networks, directly into statistical models used to map genes, predict traits, and simulate changes in the genotype-to-phenotype relationships. The research will be conducted using simulated...
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...
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 $1,999,998 National Science Foundation Project Grant, funded under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), supports research at the University of Washington to advance plant synthetic biology through deciphering the grammar of crop gene regulatory elements. The three-year award beginning March 1, 2023 will apply massively parallel reporter assays and machine learning to characterize tens of thousands of genetic regulatory elements in maize and tomato, including enhancers,...
This $300,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research to develop novel methods for genetically modifying plants using the parasitic plant Cuscuta campestris, also known as dodder. The key goals are to 1) stably transform the dodder plant to enable host gene editing, 2) create a dodder protoplast system for rapid screening of gene editing constructs, and 3) develop a dodder-mediated gene editing system....
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 Project Grant award of $520,720 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support research to develop new tools for incorporating emerging models of genetics into genetic mapping, prediction, and simulation. The research, conducted by Colorado State University, aims to better integrate molecular and cellular biology knowledge into statistical models used to map genes, predict traits, and simulate changes in the genotype-to-phenotype...
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 (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 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), supports collaborative research at North Dakota State University (NDSU) to study the relationship between legumes (such as soybeans, peas, and alfalfa) and rhizobia bacteria. The $265,001 project, running from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2026, aims to identify the plant and bacterial genes that work together to control the efficiency of nitrogen fixation in this symbiotic...