UC Berkeley — Research on Drought-Tolerant Rice (Brian Staskawicz)

[Other Scientific Research Areas] Grant Investigators: Chris Somerville and Heather Youngs This page was reviewed but not written by the grant investigators. UC Berkeley staff also reviewed this page prior to publication. The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $200,000 over three years to UC Berkeley to support Professor Brian Staskawicz's work on CRISPR modifications to increase drought tolerance in Indian rice. It's our understanding that sporadic drought has caused Indian rice yields to become erratic, which has negative impacts on the livelihood of about 100 million small farmers. The proposed experiments, which will be funded in part by a match from the Innovative Genomics Institute, will exploit recent advances in genome editing. This discretionary grant follows our December 2016 support of a plant pathology workshop at UC Berkeley and falls within our interest in funding scientific research.