In Georgia, the National Peanut Board, along with funding partner USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, were awarded three research grants focusing on genomics-enabled plant breeding. Collaborating with two peanut industry funding partners, the Southeastern Peanut Research Initiative and the Peanut Foundation, the National Peanut Board was able to allocate $542,226. NIFA’s dollar-for-dollar matching funds yielded a total of $1,084,452 for production research.
The three research projects co-funded by NIFA and NPB include the University of Florida which received $490,000 for research with the goal of developing peanut cultivars whose traits effectively utilize soil water resources. Iowa State University received $140,140 for a project that will produce genotype data for the core collection and will identify molecular markers associated with a set of 18 important peanut traits that have been identified in the collection. The University of Georgia received $454,312 for “systematic analyses of the [wild] species, selecting the ones with the most valuable traits (disease/pest resistances), making them compatible with peanut, crossing them with high producing, but susceptible elite lines and making successive selections. The goal is to combine the good agronomical traits of the elite peanut lines with the high resistance of the wild species.”