BBSRC is launching a call for applications to understand how agricultural pests and diseases become resistant to the agents currently used to control them.
The problem of resistance to antibiotics is well documented. Recently, doctors in the US were unable to save the life of a woman who had an infection caused by a bacterium which was resistant to all available antibiotics. The future has the potential to become a ‘post-antibiotic era’ unless new drugs are developed or ways are found to overcome resistance in bacteria.
Less well documented is the situation in agriculture. The majority of agricultural production (including cereals, vegetables and meat) in the developed world relies on a variety of chemical agents to control weeds, fungi, insect pests and parasites. Without these agents, crop yields would be lower (and in some cases, crops would be impossible to harvest) and livestock grow more slowly, and in some cases would die prematurely.
BBSRC is keen to address these problems, and has launched a ‘Highlight’ call for research grant applications which aim to understand how resistance develops and how it spreads through populations. The information gained from this research will hopefully help to build up a clearer picture of how organisms become resistant and how we can develop new treatments and strategies to control them.
Call status: Open
Intention to submit deadline: 29 March 2017, 4pm
Application deadline: 27 April 2017, 4pm
Aim
The aim of this highlight call is to stimulate innovative research to understand and help address the development in weeds, pests, parasites or pathogens of resistance to agents used for countering them, by:
- raising the profile amongst the broader research community of the impact of resistance on agriculture and the scientific challenges it presents
- encouraging new scientific approaches to address the practical problems for agriculture of resistance to all kinds of pesticides
- promoting collaboration between researchers with existing interests in resistance and others with wider relevant expertise in underpinning science
- stimulating innovative research to understand resistance and inform interventions for enhancing the effectiveness of existing products and optimising the use of new ones
- focusing on the molecular mechanisms of resistance, its evolutionary drivers and the ecological processes involved in its emergence and spread
- encouraging generic and comparative (including theoretical and modelling) “one health” approaches, and drawing on learning from other systems in which resistance is better understood