Ceres

The summary for the Ceres grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the DARPA Biological Technologies Office, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Ceres: Conventional soil bioremediation is laborious, inefficient, and expensive, requiring soil preparation, nutrient delivery to remediating organisms, and continuous site monitoring. Plants and their rhizosphere microbiomes have innate potential to inexpensively perform the costliest aspects of bioremediation—soil preparation, nutrient augmentation, and site monitoring—without routine human intervention. Leveraging the inherent plant-rhizosphere community, Ceres will enhance community performance by engineering synthetic communities to achieve autonomous bioremediation of a fuel, JP-8, and an explosive, TNT, from soil while overtly reporting the status of this remediation. Advances in both synthetic biology and synthetic ecology will be used to create and optimize these sophisticated synthetic communities.