BBSRC/DFG/NSF/BIO/USDA-NIFA – Future-Proofing Plants to a Changing Climate

Funding available for research projects to future proof plants for a changing climate.

This programme is provided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), US National Science Foundation – Directorate for Biological Sciences (NSF/BIO), National Institute of Food and Agriculture-United States Department of Agriculture (USDA-NIFA).

Germany, the UK and the USA have world leading capability in plant and crop sciences and together can drive greater coordination of research efforts beyond borders. Τhe programme will support collaborative research in the three countries with synergies expected to include:

• A novel route to inter-agency funding, supporting world-leading researcher collaborations across international teams with complementary expertise.
• Enabling multidisciplinary research approaches that build on areas of particular country strengths. For example, the UK’s strengths in systems biology and molecular modelling with Germany’s whole organism-level understanding and the US’s capacity to scale up modelling of crops and farming systems.
• Providing strategies to close the knowledge gap between the genetic and physiological research at individual plant scale in artificial environments and the farming system level.
• Achieving ‘sum of parts’ across complementary national research resources that can be brought to bear in new ways. For example, national facilities, datasets, and biological resources.
• Reducing duplication of effort and embedding common data standards to enhance collaboration within the international research community.
• Delivery of novel tools, methods and approaches that could be disseminated and adopted more broadly across the plant and crop sciences research community.
• Access to wider international networks and training opportunities for early career researchers, strengthening national skillsets and enhancing future international leadership and collaboration within and across the three countries.

Applications are invited for projects within, or combining, the following research areas:

• From molecules and mechanisms to field performance.
• Programmable plants.