BARD is a competitive funding program for mutually beneficial, mission-oriented, strategic and applied research of agricultural problems, jointly conducted by American and Israeli scientists. Most projects focus on increasing agricultural productivity, particularly in hot and dry climates, and emphasize plant and animal health, food quality and safety, and environmental issues. Researchers affiliated with public or not-for-profit, private entities are eligible to apply for funding.
BARD also supports international workshops and offers fellowships for graduate students, postdoctoral research and senior research scientists.
Since 1979, BARD has funded over 870 research projects in locations throughout most of the fifty states. Proposals undergo extensive peer review, carried out simultaneously and independently in both countries to ensure the highest scientific merit, and the greatest potential benefits to the agriculture of both countries. BARD has also supported a significant number of graduate students, postdoctoral training, workshops, international exchange and the purchase of permanent laboratory equipment.
Through its activities, BARD has built a bridge of cooperation between US scientists and agriculturalists and their Israeli counterparts. The benefits of this synergistic relationship have had significant impact on the agriculture of the US, Israel, the Middle East and worldwide.
While BARD is sometimes the sole funding agency of a given research program, in many cases there was additional support. The average BARD contribution to the "soft money" available to the projects was estimated by the participating scientists to be 67%. About 20% of the reporting scientists indicated that BARD funding was responsible for initiating a line of research that was subsequently also funded by other agencies.
Alleviating Heat Stress in Dairy Cattle
Summer heat stress is a major factor contributing to low fertility and milk production in lactating dairy cows. An integrated approach for improving dairy cow productivity was made possible by the continuing BARD support of a collaborative effort between scientists in Florida and Israel. The focus of their research was to elucidate the basic mechanisms regulating heat sensitive physiological functions that are associated with reproduction, nutrition and lactation.
Targeted investigations were performed in order to examine specific reproductive windows in which heat stress compromises reproductive function. This work has led to the development of a timed-insemination program that permits a greater number of cows to be inseminated prior to the more difficult heat stress season when embryonic death is high. The program has increased pregnancy rates during the heat-stressful summer months.
Breeding for Heat Tolerant Wheat Varieties
Research carried out cooperatively between scientists at ARO, the Volcani Center in Israel and Texas Tech University in the United States has focused on the mechanisms of heat tolerance in wheat. Wheat varieties must be heat-tolerant to produce under the dry hot environments of either Israel or the U.S. Great Plains. The study revealed that the ability to accumulate Heat Shock Proteins was not the important mechanism that determines heat-tolerance, measured as the ability of the variety to yield under heat stress.
Instead, traits such as cell membrane stability under heat stress, heat-stable carbon assimilation, and ability to form grain from carbon reserves stored in the stems were the important characteristics. By selecting for these specific traits, elite lines of wheat were developed that are very heat tolerant. This research also developed knowledge based on appropriate genetic markers required for use of marker-assisted selection as a tool in breeding wheat for heat tolerance. BARD was a key source of funding for the basic research component of this scientifically outstanding project.
Improving Wheat-Seed Proteins by Molecular Approaches
The wheat laboratories at the Weizmann Institute, Israel and the ARS, Albany, CA teamed up through three BARD funded projects to develop the basic information needed to understand and genetically engineer better wheat quality. Among the results of this project were a better understanding of the contributions of wheat quality proteins and protein domains to the functional properties of wheat doughs and the construction of the first complete synthetic cereal storage protein gene. They demonstrated, for the first time, that one can alter parameters related to dough properties and showed the usefulness of bacterial-produced wheat-quality proteins in the study of dough parameters.
Their current BARD-supported project focuses on nutritional rather than functional attributes of the wheat-seed proteins that determine quality, including a molecular approach to increase the levels of the essential amino acid lysine in cereal grains. If successful, this latest project will lay a foundation for genetic engineering of nutritional quality, a long hoped for payoff, but a result still to be realized.
(SOURCE: http://www.bard-isus.com)
U.S. security assistance to Israel plays a critical role in helping the Jewish state defend itself against a myriad of threats.
