The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is twofold: (1) to stimulate basic and mechanistic science that facilitates the development of effective probiotics or pre-/probiotic combinations of relevance to human health and disease; and (2) determine biological outcomes for the evaluation of efficacy of pre/probiotics in appropriate test systems and animal models. This FOA encourages basic and mechanistic studies using in vitro, in vivo, ex vivo, and in silico models that focus on prebiotic/probiotic strain selectivity, interaction, and function. It will also encourage inter and multidisciplinary collaborations among scientists in a wide range of disciplines including nutritional science, immunology, microbiomics, genomics, other '-omic' sciences, biotechnology, and bioinformatics.
Brief Description