Project Grant W911NF0910286

This three-year National Science Foundation project grant of $240,000 supports research investigating how bacterial endospore formation affects host-microbe codiversification. The grantee will analyze metagenome-assembled genomes from museum rodent fecal samples to test for congruence between bacterial and rodent host phylogenies, indicating long-term associations. Bacteria will also be cultured from feces under anaerobic conditions and assayed for endospore formation. Phylogenetic multi-level...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855), provides $237,006 to The Research Foundation For The State University Of New York (RF SUNY) to study the mechanisms by which Enterococcus faecalis inhibits sporulation of Clostridioides difficile. The central hypothesis is that E. faecalis suppresses C. difficile sporulation through direct cell-cell contact. The research aims...

This federal Project Grant award R21AI175964, totaling $826,031, was provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855). The grant supports research to elucidate the process of exosporium assembly in Bacillus anthracis spores, with a focus on describing the stable, non-covalent attachment between the proteins BclA and BxpB. The research aims to use structural and genetic methods, including X-ray...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (CFDA 93.855 - Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research) provides $1,541,024.00 to the University of Notre Dame to support research on the spore germination pathway of the bacterium Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) and its pharmacological intervention. The research aims to elucidate the details of the spore germination process, demonstrate that inhibiting spore germination is key to preventing...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855) provides $1,148,123 to the University of Wisconsin System to conduct research on the maturation, germination, and pathogenesis of Cryptococcus spores. The overarching goal is to gain a better understanding of how infectious fungal spores survive and transition into vegetative growth, with the objective of identifying new...

This $462,500 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Biomedical Research and Research Training Program (CFDA 93.859) aims to decipher the genetic regulation of bacterial heterogeneity in response to antibiotic stress using single-cell transcriptomics. The award will fund a 5-year research project led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital to comprehensively characterize bacterial heterogeneity under antibiotic treatment and identify the...

This federal Project Grant award for $458,050 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Biomedical Research and Research Training Program (CFDA 93.859) aims to investigate the role of temperature-sensitive germline structures in the thermal limits of fertility across Caenorhabditis nematode species. The research under this 3-year award, which begins on August 1, 2024, will focus on two key germline-specific structures - the synaptonemal complex and the P granules - to...

This National Science Foundation Project Grant, awarded under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), provides $372,000 in funding to Dartmouth College to investigate the role of stochastic gene expression and spatial organization in generating phenotypic diversity within microbial populations during antibiotic responses. The research aims to elucidate the fundamental physical and biological mechanisms that enable microbial communities to adapt and exhibit complex...

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) awarded a $1,431,000 Project Grant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop self-assembling nanomaterials that can protect microbes from processing, transportation, and storage stresses. The goal is to enable the production of important but challenging microbial therapeutics that are difficult to manufacture. The 3-year project, with an award date of September 18, 2023, aims to elucidate the mechanism by which...

This three-year, $673,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research into the role of ecological interactions in diversification among coexisting microbial species. The University of California, Irvine will study how commensal interactions, where one species benefits while the other is unaffected, influence the formation of new bacterial species in microbial communities. Researchers will culture bacteria in a commensal...