Recipient Organization
PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
408 Old Main
UNIVERSITY PARK,PA 16802-1505
Performing Department
Plant Pathology and Environmen
Non Technical Summary
Microbes play important roles in agriculture in numerous ways, including the efficiency of producing, safety, and the nutritional of food. Even though microbes are recognized to provide critical functions for each of these aspects of food, we currently lack effective ways to manipulate these microbes to better serve our needs. In the past 15 years, we have experienced a significant increase in our ability to identify the numbers and types of microbes present in different agricultural environments. This has not, however, resulted in an increased ability to manipulate microbes for our benefit. By increasing our ability to not only identify and count, but also isolate, diverse microbes from different environments, we will take an additional step towards being able to tailor microbial communities (microbiomes) to enhance agricultural production, food safety, and nutrition.
Animal Health Component
25%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
75%
Applied
25%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to enhance microbiome research by Penn State researchers by greatly expand their ability to efficiently cultivate novel bacterial isolates from diverse environmental sources, including plants, fungi, soil, water, food, and animals, for functional validation. The Prospector Instrument for high-throughput isolation, cultivation and screening of bacteria, which is manufactured and sold by General Automation Laboratory Technologies (GALT), will greatly enhance the ability to recover bacteria that potentially play crucial roles in specific biological or ecological processes. The key advantage of this system is that it allows for comprehensive isolation of microbiome constituents that are otherwise challenging to culture.Objective 1: Purchase and install the Prospector System on the Penn State Univeristy Park campus so that is functional by June 1, 2021, at the latest.
Project Methods
As this project is not a single scientific project, but a project that will bring new equipment to Penn State scientists, which will enhance their research and teaching activities. These efforts will collectively include formal classroom instruction, student (undergraduate and graduate) mentorship, postdoctoral mentorship, and outreach to primary stakeholders.These outputs will be evaluated by enumerating the number of publications, outreach events, mentored personnel, classes taught that involved the use or products of the Prospector System.