26 October 2026, Arkansas, USA: A four-state US university research team has received a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to find out whether a common soil fungus can be turned into a commercial seed or soil treatment that helps rice and wheat survive drought.
Arkansas State University is leading the four-year project, which also involves the University of Kansas, the University of Nebraska and Kansas State University. Arkansas State’s share of the award is $2.2 million, funded through the NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, under a track called Research Infrastructure Improvement: Focused EPSCoR Collaborations, which is designed to fund multi-state research partnerships. The project is titled “Boosting Tolerance to Water Stress in Rice and Wheat Using Mycorrhizal Inoculants” and runs from August 2026 through July 2030.
The principal investigator is Dr. Argelia Lorence, a professor of metabolic engineering at Arkansas State, working with co-principal investigator Dr. Scott Mangan, an associate professor of ecology at the same university. The wider team spans plant biology, ecology, physiology and genomics across the four participating universities.
What the fungi do
The project centres on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, a group of naturally occurring soil fungi that form a symbiotic, or mutually beneficial, relationship with the roots of most food crops, including rice and wheat. The fungi colonise plant roots and extend a network of extremely fine filaments, called hyphae, into the surrounding soil, well beyond where the plant’s own roots can reach. This effectively widens the area of soil a plant can draw water and nutrients, particularly phosphorus, from, in exchange for sugars the fungi receive from the plant. Scientists have studied these fungi’s role in nutrient uptake for decades, but the Arkansas State-led team is focused specifically on whether formulating them as an inoculant, a product applied to seed or soil to introduce beneficial microbes, can measurably improve how rice and wheat cope with water stress during drought.
The research combines laboratory and genomic work on how the fungi and their host plants respond to drought at a molecular level with field trials across the different growing conditions found in the four participating states, which range from the humid rice country of eastern Arkansas to the drier wheat belts of Kansas and Nebraska. Running the same inoculant concept across such different climates and soil types is deliberate: a fungal strain that helps a crop cope with water stress in one region will not necessarily perform the same way elsewhere, so the team needs multi-state data before it can say whether a single inoculant, or a set of region-specific ones, would be needed for a commercial product. The grant also funds a socioeconomic research strand examining how willing farmers would be to adopt a fungal inoculant technology, work that is meant to run alongside the biological research rather than after it, so that any product to emerge from the project is designed with real-world adoption barriers, such as cost, shelf life and ease of application, in mind from the outset.
Because the project only began in August 2026, no experimental results have been published yet, and Arkansas State’s own announcement of the award, issued in September, describes planned work rather than findings. This is a research-funding story, not a results story, and should be read as the start of a four-year effort rather than evidence that a fungal drought treatment is ready for use.
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