Project Grant R44AI140943

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 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...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $5,750,408 Cooperative Agreement under its Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) program (CFDA 47.084) to establish the NSF Biofoundry for Extreme & Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (EX-FAB) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in collaboration with the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (CPP). The EX-FAB biofoundry will develop automated workflows...

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...

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 three-year, $387,240 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will support improvements to FAPROTAX, a popular database and computational tool for predicting the metabolic functions encoded by prokaryotic taxa in microbiome surveys. FAPROTAX2 will incorporate additional experimental evidence from literature, redefine metabolic functions consistently with the Metacyc pathway database, include phenotypic data from thousands of...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859) supports the development of efficient and accurate methods for identifying novel natural product small molecules from complex mass spectral datasets. The $275,484 award, which began on Sep 1, 2023 and runs through Aug 31, 2024, will enable the grantee, Chemia Biosciences, Inc., to integrate genome mining with computational metabolomics to...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859), supports the development of a novel computational platform for discovering non-ribosomal peptide natural products. The $781,502 award to Chemia Biosciences, Inc., a small disadvantaged business in Pittsburgh, PA, aims to create efficient and accurate methods for identifying new natural product small molecules from complex mass...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) program (CFDA 47.084) provides $275,000 in funding to Myconaut LLC to develop a scalable biological remediation method that uses synergistic interactions between fungi and plants to degrade and remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from contaminated environments. The project aims to expand the understanding of fungal degradation of PFAS, evaluate the...