Funding-DOE -
Transportation Energy Resources From Renewable Agriculture
(TERRA); November 17, 2014
Agency
Department
of Energy
Description
There
is an urgent need to accelerate energy crop development for the production of
renewable transportation fuels from biomass. Recent technological advancements
have now made it possible to extract massive volumes of genetic, physiological,
and environmental data from certain crops, but, even with these resources, the
data still cannot be processed into the knowledge needed to predict crop
performance in the field. This knowledge is required to improve the breeding
development pipeline for energy crops. Building upon precision agriculture
innovations and data-intensive computational approaches, ARPA-E believes that
it is now possible to accelerate plant breeding, using robust high-throughput
precision phenotyping systems, to quantify important
agronomic traits in the field throughout the entire lifecycle of an individual
plant, and to associate these traits with their genetic and genomic properties.
This ARPA-E program, Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture
(TE RRA), is an investment in technologies that increase the precision,
accuracy and throughput of energy crop breeding, to enable (a) new predictive
algorithms for plant growth, (b) more detailed measurements for plant
physiology, and (c) more sophisticated bioinformatics pipelines for gene
discovery and trait association. TERRA will enable breeders to evaluate more
individual plants, to select appropriate plants for breeding earlier in the
growing season, to capture better information about them during their
development, and to associate this information with the best genes to
propagate. Success will be measured by the prospective ability to predict yield
gains early, specifically, to identify which genes can improve carbon capture
efficiency in newly cultivated bioenergy crops. Although other crops will be
considered, this program intends to focus on energy sorghum as a model system
because of its potential for improvement through breeding, its resources for
genetic analysis, its geo graphic adaptability, and its commercial utility. To
obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the
ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov.
ARPA-E will not review or consider concept papers submitted through other
means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE,
please refer to the ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx).
Announcement
Number: DE-FOA-0001211
Closing
Date: Nov 17, 2014
Link
to Full Announcement
http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=267728
Contact
Information
Kelly
M. Harper