Two Blades Foundation receives $2.3M gift

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded $2.3M to the Two Blades Foundation (2Blades), a charitable organization that supports the development of durable disease resistance in crop plants and their deployment in agriculture.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded $2.3M to the Two Blades Foundation (2Blades), a charitable organization that supports the development of durable disease resistance in crop plants and their deployment in agriculture. | Shutterstock
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation recently awarded $2.3 million to the Two Blades Foundation (2Blades), a charitable organization that supports the development of durable disease resistance in crop plants and their deployment in agriculture.

Four well-recognized research teams will investigate plant immunity in the United States and Europe. Jeff Dangl (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Brian Staskawicz (University of California-Berkeley), Jonathan Jones (Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich), and Detlef Weigel (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany) will lead the project at their world-class research institutions.

Understanding plant immunity is essential to helping reduce diseases that can radically alter the production and quality of food. With a rapidly growing global population, losses to important food crops, like potatoes and wheat, can be disastrous. Not only can plant disease have an economic impact, it can affect health and natural ecosystems.