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Ames, IA The Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative has awarded nine grants to 27 institutions in the third and final round of project seed grant competition.

The Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative, a three-year project ending in 2023, is funded by the U.S. Department of Agricultures National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The goal of AG2PI is to connect crop and livestock scientists to each other and to those working in data science, statistics, engineering and social sciences to identify shared problems and collaborate on solutions.

The awarded projects help advance multidisciplinary crop and livestock research by addressing genome-to-phenome challenges, developing solutions for research infrastructure needs, or sharing solutions across kingdoms.

The seed grant projects awarded in Round 3 will run from 6 to 12 months and span three funding levels:

Two of the new grants, which support critical needs in research data management and standardization, involve Iowa State University faculty.

An enabling-level grant, Creating a FAIR Data Ecosystem for Incorporating Single Cell Genomics Data into Agricultural G2P Research is a project led by Christopher Tuggle, professor in the Department of Animal Science, Iowa State University. The international team includes: Christine Elsik, University of Missouri; Peter Harrison, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK; Nicholas Provart, University of Toronto; and collaborators Tony Burdett, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute; Tim Tickle, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Marc Libault, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Wes Warren, University of Missouri; Ben Cole, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and James Koltes, Iowa State.

Through deep international collaboration, the project aims to create an agricultural equivalent to the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform (HCA DCP), which will improve the availability of RNA single-cell data sequencing output to crop and livestock researchers. The project will provide training to early career scientists under Tuggles and Elsiks advisement, who will be working directly with scientists at HCA DCP and testing the agricultural metadata standards for usability.

An emerging-level grant, led by Hao Cheng at the University of California-Davis, also includes ISU faculty as well as international collaborators. Tuggle and Distinguished Professor Jack C.M. Dekkers, also in the ISU Department of Animal Science, are co-investigators; collaborators Richard Mott and Lingzhao Fang, both based in the UK, round out the team members. The project, Homomorphic Encryption to Enable Sharing of Confidential Data, will test and evaluate an approach that allows multiple researchers to access and analyze encrypted datasets while protecting intellectual property and ensuring FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data use principles.

Other project teams receiving AG2PI Round 3 seed grants include:

Emerging Grants:

Enabling Grants:

Establishing Grants:

For more information on all the awarded AG2PI seed grants as well as other grant opportunities, visit the webpage: https://www.ag2pi.org/seed-grants/.

The AG2PI is funded by the U.S. Department of Agricultures National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The goal of AG2PI is to build communities that address the challenges of genome-to-phenome research across crops and livestock. The AG2PI partners include Iowa State University, University of Nebraska, University of Arizona, University of Idaho and the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.

Read more from the original source:

New grants awarded in Agricultural Genome-to-Phenome research - College of Agriculture and Life Sciences