The Dagdas and Belkhadir labs were awarded a Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (Vienna Science and Technology Fund) grant from the 2017 Life Science call for Chemical Biology. The grant, "Manipulation of plant innate immune responses by small molecule chemical probes", is coordinated by Yasin Dagdas and also involves Tim Clausen from the IMP, a neighboring institute at the Vienna BioCenter.

The three labs will use chemical biology approaches to develop novel molecular probes for studying how autophagy is activated following the recognition of pathogen-associated molecular patterns by plant pathogen recognition receptors.  The total amount awarded was €699,600, and will fund a PhD student in each of the three labs for 4 years.

77 projects were originally considered for the call, 25 were invited to submit a full proposal, and 8 projects were finally funded - half of them from researchers at the Vienna BioCenter.  

The announcement from the VBC is here.

More about the WWTF can be found on their website.