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USDA Announces New SARS-COV-2 Research Funding Opportunity Through the American Rescue Plan Act

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has announced it will commit up to $24 million for research grants through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) program. These grants will support research that directly aligns with APHIS' American Rescue Plan strategic framework and will support APHIS and its One Health partners' efforts to identify risks and plan effective interventions to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at the human-animal interface and to prevent impacts to the food supply.

These funds will make grants available to eligible state and federal agencies, academia, private organizations or corporations, and individuals. The three AFRI program area priorities for this research solicitation are Diseases of Agricultural Animals; Agricultural Biosecurity; and Inter-Disciplinary Engagement in Animal Sciences (IDEAS). The NSF EEID program's central theme is quantitative or computational understanding of pathogen transmission dynamics, and supports research on the ecological, evolutionary, organismal, and social drivers that influence the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. 

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Leman Swine Conference: Vaccination strategies to reduce PRRS virus recombination

Video: Leman Swine Conference: Vaccination strategies to reduce PRRS virus recombination

Dr. Jay Calvert, Research Director with Zoetis, recently spoke to The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 2023 Leman Swine Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, about his conference presentation on porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus recombination.

“The number one problem in PRRS these days from a vaccine point of view is the emergence of new strains of PRRS. Since the beginning, we have had new strains and a lot of diversity,” said Dr. Jay Calvert. “We thought we knew it was all about mutation changes in amino acids and the individual strains over time, but they take on new characteristics.”

With the onset of more common whole genome sequencing and recombination analysis, Dr. Calvert says there is another mechanism, and recombination seems to be a key factor.