Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Awards $2.3M for Plant Disease Resistance | Business Wire

"The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded $2.3M to the Two Blades Foundation (2Blades), a charitable organization that supports the development of durable disease resistance in crop plants and their deployment in agriculture.  Four well-recognized research teams will investigate plant immunity in the United States and Europe. Jeff Dangl (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Brian Staskawicz (University of California, Berkeley), Jonathan Jones(Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK) and Detlef Weigel (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany) will lead the project at their world-class research institutions.  Understanding plant immunity is essential to helping reduce diseases that can radically alter the production and quality of food. With a rapidly growing global population, losses to important food crops, like potatoes and wheat, can be disastrous. Not only can plant disease have an economic impact, it can affect our health and natural ecosystems. Look no further than the recent warnings by scientists about wheat crops facing a serious threat from a fungal disease that could wipe out the crop if not contained quickly, threatening our global food security. Or from a more historical time, the Great Famine in Ireland that took the lives of more than one million people, and the migration of another one million or more, due to a disease in potatoes commonly known as potato blight.  The research teams will focus on three agricultural plant systems found worldwide: Brassicas (mustard greens and their relatives), which are important model organisms in plant biology; nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes and their relatives); and domesticated wheat and related species ... As part of the project, the teams will develop a publicly available database containing sequence information on the plant species investigated. This open-access database will help other scientists and agricultural agencies around the world improve disease resistance in plants and better help address food security ..."