small business grants Ascribe Bioscience receives NSF small-business grant - Cornell Chronicle Posted: 28 Mar 2019 07:44 AM PDT Ascribe Bioscience, which applies the emerging field of metabolomics to the soil microbiome to develop new products for agriculture, has become the first company based on technology developed at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) to receive a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. Soybean plants grown from seeds that were coated with Ascribe's lead product, right, were healthier and had higher survival rates compared to plants grown with untreated seeds, left, when infected with Phytophthora sojae. The agricultural biotech startup will use the $225,000 Phase I award from the NSF to develop a seed treatment technology that protects plants from a broad range of pests and pathogens. Ithaca-based Ascribe was founded in 2017 by BTI scientists and Cornell faculty member