The first of of three research themes that have been identified for this call include the agronomic nitrogen use efficiency. This can be achieved by optimising farm practices and soil management to make more effective use of fertilisers and reduce losses of reactive nitrogen to the environment.

Apart from that, the biological nitrogen use efficiency is another theme under the program. It will be focussed on improving the efficiency of nitrogen uptake or metabolism by plants. The third one is biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) for enhancing nitrogen-fixation in legumes or exploiting the potential of BNF in non-leguminous plants.

As per the call from DBT, "Integrative, multidisciplinary and multi-scale approaches are encouraged, and there is particular scope for interaction between plant, agricultural and environmental scientists, and N2 use in the context of the global nitrogen cycle at the interface between the remits of DBT, BBSRC and NERC"

This funding will be matched by the respective partner organizations.

The full call text that will provide more information about the scientific scope, scale and instructions on how to construct and submit an application and will be announced by April 27, 2015.

A Virtual Joint Center proposed for it as per notification, is essentially a large research grant that has additional flexibility to enable support to deliver the partnership and to enable existing resources to be allocated to the project.

Activities that could be included within a Joint Center include joint research projects between researchers at the partner centers in agreed research areas; laboratory exchanges including short and longer term visits, exchange of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers or visiting fellows; sharing of key resources across the partner centres; supporting wider activities to strengthen links, for example holding symposia,workshops, seminars, meetings etc; equipment that will support the joint research.