Pingtao Ding (University of Leiden) receives ERC Proof of Concept Grant

Congratulations to Pingtao Ding on being awarded European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept Grant for the project GRASP: AI-enabled Gene Regulatory Analysis for Crop Stress Resilience! 🌾🌾

The proof-of-concept grant is worth €150,000 and helps current and recent ERC grantees to explore the commercial or societal potential of their research findings.

GRASP: AI-enabled Gene Regulatory Analysis for Crop Stress
Climate change and emerging plant diseases are placing increasing pressure on global food production. Improving crop resilience requires a better understanding of how plants regulate their responses to environmental stress. The GRASP project develops computational approaches that combine artificial intelligence with plant genomics to identify gene regulatory networks involved in stress responses. Rather than focusing on individual genes, the project aims to understand how groups of genes work together over time to coordinate plant defence and adaptation.
By integrating biological knowledge with advanced computational analysis, GRASP seeks to generate interpretable predictions that can support hypothesis generation and future crop research. The project will establish computational resources that facilitate the analysis of complex plant genomic datasets and contribute to the broader field of systems biology [Source].