The European Research Council has awarded Emil Damgaard Jensen an ERC Starting Grant of EUR 1.6 million. ERC Starting Grants are awarded to some of Europe's most promising early-career researchers, enabling them to build their own research teams and pursue groundbreaking ideas.
The grant will fund Emil Damgaard Jensen's new project, CellFun, which addresses one of the world's major food security challenges: Fungal plant pathogens that destroy at least a third of the global harvest each year.
Currently, knowledge of how phytopathogenic fungi communicate with and invade crops is severely limited, particularly regarding G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), for which around 90% of mechanisms remain understudied. With CellFun, Emil Damgaard Jensen aims to establish a high-throughput experimental platform to investigate these understudied GPCRs and uncover how natural molecules secreted by plants and bacteria interact with them.
The goal is to map these signaling pathways to develop targeted new molecules and formulations that can suppress fungal virulence and reduce future crop losses without relying on conventional pesticides.
