ARIA Programmable Plants Funding Call

Funding for ideas that sit within ARIA’s Programmable Plants opportunity space.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) funds projects across the full spectrum of R&D disciplines, approaches, and institutions. To support scientific and technological breakthroughs outside of programmes, ARIA Programme Directors can award opportunity seeds to support ambitious research aligned to the opportunity spaces they’ve identified.

Programme Director Angie Burnett’s opportunity space, Programmable Plants, asks: ‘how can we programme a plant to do anything we want it to do?’

The following are in scope of this call:

• Ideas that sit within the Programmable Plants opportunity space. Proposals should show how an idea either aligns with or challenges the assumptions of the Summary, Beliefs, or Observations in the opportunity space document.
  • Both land plants and aquatic plants (including green algae) are in scope.
  • Microorganisms influencing plants are in scope, provided that they are being used to alter an aspect of a plant’s form or function.
• Ideas that could change the conversation about what is possible or valuable.
• Ideas that range from early stage curiosity-driven research through to pre-commercial science and technology.