WSU gets million dollar USDA grant, also Life Sciences Discovery Fund grants
Washington Ag Today September 22, 2009 Washington State University is receiving a one-million dollar grant from the USDA’s Integrated Organic Program to study how to raise organic wheat and barley. The project, to be centered in Washington also involves Idaho and Oregon and will start October 1st. Professor Rich Koenig, co-principal investigator for the grant and chair of WSU’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, says they are trying to make organic dryland wheat production agronomically and economically successful to benefit the growers and the environment. Koenig also says his department has finally succeeded in getting some grants from Washington state’s Life Sciences Discovery Fund. Koenig: “One project funded with Dr. Dieter von Wettstein to look at developing gluten-free wheat for celiac patients. This is approximately 1.1 million dollars from this fund together with about 800-thousand dollars from the National Institutes of Health and some other stimulus money. So, in total he is well over two-million dollars focused on this effort to develop gluten-free wheat. And then the other project Dr. Bill Pan and Dr. Ian Burke in the department were funded, together with some researchers with the University of Washington, to extract some anti-cancer agents from sage brush, a weed in Washington.” 48 The Life Sciences Discovery Fund is supported by payments under the Master Tobacco Settlement. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
