Robert Grebenok, PhD, professor of biology, is part of an interdisciplinary research team that received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Grebenok’s team will use the grant to investigate the biochemical, physiological, genetic and ecological inter-play between herbivorous insects and agriculturally important crop plants.

Through its research, the team hopes to find ways to assist plants in maintaining their health, while eliminating pesticide use. The interdisciplinary research teams focus is to identify the gut proteins that herbivorous insects use to take up particular nutritional components from their food and find ways to assist the plant in stopping the function of these proteins.

A higher plant biochemist and physiologist at Canisius College, Grebenok studies how higher plants protect themselves against insects. His research teams have been conducting research in the area of plant, insect and ecosystem interactions for the past 20 years and have authored five grants, which have generated in excess of $1.5 million dollars in government support.

Submitted by: Public Relations