Purpose

Applications are invited for project grants to support excellent research within plant science, agriculture* and food biotechnology. Projects must be based at a university or other non-profit research institution in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden.

The proposed research should address major challenges within plant, agricultural, and food science associated with developing sustainable agriculture and food production. The research should be fundamental in character with a clear and strategic outlook to improve sustainability and potential solutions. The proposed research should significantly extent existing knowledge beyond state-of-the-art and may have a high-risk profile. The research should be based on life science research disciplines.

Non-exclusive list of prioritized areas:

• Development of plants with high productivity, resiliency, and resource-use-efficiency for food, fiber, materials, fuel and energy, chemicals, or climate change mitigation
• Utilization of microorganisms to improve sustainability across the value chain from primary agricultural production to end-product
• Development of agricultural-, food-, and forestry systems with higher productivity, circularity, and biodiversity, and with minimum impact on environment and climate
• Development of plant-, microorganism-, and fungi-based foods with low resource-use-technologies and high functionality, organoleptic, and nutritional quality
• Utilization of precision fermentation, fungi, algae, and cellular agriculture for novel food production
• Development of methods and technologies, including those driven by data science, that enable and support sustainable agriculture and food production.

The program will not support:

• Research primarily focusing on livestock, livestock commodities, and feed
• Research with their main research component on nutritional uptake and clinical studies.

Proposals focusing on industrial biotechnology and environmental biotechnology should be submitted to the Novo Nordisk Foundation Committee Industrial Biotechnology and Environmental Biotechnology, while proposals with a focus on pharmaceuticals and therapeutics should be submitted to the Novo Nordisk Foundation Committee on Bioscience and Basic Biomedicine.

*Agriculture is here defined as terrestrial farming and cultivation of plants, including forestry.