News

At the conclusion of a pilot study for Michigan State University’s Plant Resilience Institute (PRI), microbial ecologist Ashley Shade had a hunch that started a chain reaction of exciting interdisciplinary and international collaboration and landed Shade and her team a three-year, $750,000 USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) grant to investigate the seed microbiome of the common bean.

PRI members awarded $25,000 from the USDA-ARS Office of National Programs to evaluate wild bean germplasm for disease resistance and adaptive root traits.

PRI members Hannah Peplinski, Weijia Wang, and Miranda Haus from the Buell and Cichy labs translated recent PRI-funded work to the general public during the ASPB sponsored Fascination of Plants day at Michigan State University.

PRI's Ashley Shade, microbial ecologist, was selected as a 2019-2023 Ecological Society of America (ESA) Early Career Fellow for her pioneering work into advancing the understanding of the consequences of microbial diversity for resilience, how interactions among microbes impact resilience and how microbiomes can be leveraged to support plant stress tolerance and ecosystem stability.

A new study from the Sharkey lab looks at a pivotal sugar molecule, called glucose 6-phosphate (G6P), that is the first step towards making starch.

Five world-renown scientists with expertise in plant resilience visited MSU-PRI for a three day meeting.