September 20, 2021
Improved, practical crop breeding tools are essential to meet the increasing global demands for sustainable food production, made more urgent by the unpredictable stresses driven by a changing climate.
To help meet this need, the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) has awarded a $3.99 million award to researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Iowa State University to develop an efficient, robust genome engineering toolkit that will introduce greater genetic diversity to tropical maize and its temperate cousin, corn.