Wednesday, October 5th 2016
Every human, animal, and plant is home to a range of microbes, mostly helpful, some harmful. How does this community of microorganisms contribute to the prevention or spread of disease? Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) announced an FY16 grant of $2.5 million to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to help answer some of these questions by studying the microbiome of tall fescue. This is one of several grants awarded through the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) program, an interagency collaboration among the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation. The EEID program supports research to better understand how disease is spread to humans, plants, and animals. This research can ultimately help American farmers combat infectious diseases that affect the health of crops and livestock animals. The University of North Carolina project focuses on tall fescue, an agriculturally important grass, often used for forage and erosion control. The research will test whether key members of the tall fescue microbiome, such as fungi can reduce disease in individual plants or reduce disease transmission across the population.