BATON ROUGE — A group of LSU AgCenter scientists are part of a project that has received a $6 million grant to research more climate-resistant soybeans, the university announced in a release Tuesday.

Plant pathologist Jong Ham has been investigating how soybean seeds treated with bacterial agents can help soybean plants fight stress, especially following a period of extreme drought across Louisiana in the past year.

Funding for the project comes from the National Science Foundation's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Ham's Interdisciplinary Program of Advancing Climate Extreme Resilience in Soybean is one of 14 projects that were awarded $77.8 million in funding, LSU said.

The iPACERS project, led by a geneticist and professor in the Clemson University Department of Genetics and Biochemistry, also includes researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Mississippi State University as well as Ham and four other scientists—Changyoon Jeong, David Moseley, Kevin Hoffseth and Mark Schafer—from the LSU AgCenter.

The four-year project will see the team study two varieties of soybeans, one of which tolerates hot and dry conditions better than the other. Ham's job will be to identify microbial agents that can induce a stress protection response in soybean plants and the research aims to better understand the mechanics behind how the bacteria is offering these protections, LSU said.

"In the soil, there are millions of different species or microorganisms living in there, and there are dynamics within the soil," Ham said. "We will explore this extremely complicated microbial community through cutting-edge bioinformatics approaches to better understand its structure and dynamics according to environmental stresses, especially heat and drought, which are critical issues in agriculture."

Project lead Shahid Mukhtar says the study could be a model for other food crops like corn, the most widely grown plant in the United States.