Project Grant R43AI138765

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) under CFDA 93.859 Biomedical Research and Research Training Program provides $308,925 to Chemia Biosciences, Inc. to develop computational technologies for discovering novel fungal natural products with potential antimicrobial and therapeutic applications. The primary goal is to create software that can predict the molecular structures of natural products encoded in fungal genomes, leveraging high-throughput...

The University of California, Santa Barbara will establish functional genomics capabilities in anaerobic fungi under a $480,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems. The three-year award, made under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), will support collaborative research to develop genomic tools and resources for anaerobic fungi. These fungi play important roles in agriculture and carbon cycling but their genetics are not well...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) Project Grant award of $275,000 provides funding to Clue Genetics Inc. for the development of a fungi-focused metabologenomics platform for natural product discovery. The key products and services to be delivered under this 1-year Phase I SBIR project include: Annotating biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) from 200 genomes selected from a diverse set of bioactive fungi to uncover new drugs,...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) provides $955,781 to Clark University in Worcester, MA to study the diversity, evolution, and origin of novel secondary metabolism in commensal microscopic filamentous fungi. The research aims to reconstruct relationships among Basidiobolus fungal species, explore how secondary metabolite genes vary across these species and test whether some were acquired from bacteria through horizontal...

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) awarded a $780,034 Project Grant under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855) to The Regents of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to develop new chemoenzymatic methods for synthesizing infection-targeted PET radiotracers from the common oncologic tracer 2-deoxy-[18F]-fluoro-D-glucose ([18F]FDG). The goal is to increase access to new PET imaging tools for detecting Staphylococcus...

This $369,651 project grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) supports research at Ferris State University to characterize the biosynthesis of glycosylated anthracyclines, a class of polyketide natural products with potential anti-cancer and antibiotic properties. The project aims to refactor two higher anthracycline pathways in actinomycetes and use combinatorial biosynthesis to synthesize new anthracycline analogs with potentially novel...

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) awarded a $405,015 Project Grant under the Biomedical Research and Research Training Program (CFDA 93.859) to the Inter American University of Puerto Rico, Inc. (Metropolitan Campus) to investigate the mechanism of action of antibacterial synthetic unsaturated fatty acids (UFAs) against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The key objectives of this 3-year project are to determine if UFAs such as 2-hexadecynoic acid...

This federal Project Grant award from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (CFDA 93.213 - Research and Training in Complementary and Integrative Health) provides $295,306.00 to Varigen Biosciences Corp to develop a universal fungal transposase system for increasing natural product and protein titers. The research aims to address limitations in heterologous strain performance for fungal natural products and enzymes, which represent large and...

This federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research (CFDA 93.855) program, will support research to accelerate the discovery of novel antifungal peptides. The $642,775 award to the University of California, Davis will fund a multi-step, high-throughput screening platform leveraging one-bead one-compound (OBOC) combinatorial technology. The goal is to rapidly identify and optimize...

This cooperative agreement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service will fund the development and validation of fungicide resistance monitoring tools for Botrytis species in specialty crops. Michigan State University will receive $133,735 to enhance fungicide resistance management through improved detection and monitoring of resistance development. Specifically, the university will develop molecular markers for fungicide resistance to FRAC groups 2, 7, 9, 11, and 12,...