14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) say that they have just awarded a total of 28 new grants to various research groups, as part of the 13th year of investigations for the Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP).
This long-term research initiative is aimed at gaining more insight into the structure and function of genomes. The grants the NSF approved are worth a total of $101.9 million, and they are given for periods spanning two to five years.
The grants themselves are worth between $634,000 and $9.6 million each, depending on the area for which they were awarded. The teams that got the money need to develop functional genomics resources for plants.
Important crops such as corn, cotton, rice, soybean, tomato and wheat will naturally make the main object of the investigation, given the large number of people that depend on them for their survival.
“These projects will provide new insights into how changes in plant genomes translate into changes in growth and development in a range of environments,” explains the acting assistant director for the NSF Biological Sciences division, Joann Roskoski.
“Basic research leads to new discoveries that will improve the quality and yield of crop plants, and in the longer term, to innovations that will support the bio-based economy of the 21st century,” she adds.
Asian, European and Central American researchers collaborate with the 42 institutions in 26 states that got the NSF funds. They too will participate in studying plant genome.
“The development of a wealth of genomics tools and sequence resources developed over the past 13 years of the PGRP continues to enable exciting, new comparative approaches and predictive modeling to uncover gene networks that regulate plant development and growth in changing environments,” the NSF says.
The PGRP was first established back in 1998, and is a part of the National Plant Genome Initiative (NPGI). The initiative is managed by the Interagency Working Group on Plant Genomes of the National Science and Technology Council.
The group features representatives from the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the NSF, the Agency for International Development, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Office of Management and Budget.