Description of the project/initiative

Domains covered by the project/initiative:

• Plant genetic resources (PGR)

Number of partners: 29
Scope of the project: EU
Initial motivation for starting the project/initiative: Europe faces the challenge of delivering safe, high-quality, and health-promoting food and feed as well as bio-products in an economical, environmentally sensitive, and sustainable manner across environments that face climatic change and increasing abiotic and biotic stresses. Triticeae cereals (wheat, barley, rye) are essential in human and domestic animal nutrition and are the most important crops for European agriculture. Existing germplasm resources and current breeding methods alone are insufficient for understanding the mechanisms underlying important traits and for catalyzing a quantum leap in yield, sustainability and quality improvement. Major advances in crops require large number of direct genomics approaches, built on relevant data from model plants (rice, Brachypodium) to solve such important problems and to meet the challenges of obtaining cereal crops with combine resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses and improved yield potential. Such a strategy is massively complex and can only be carried out efficiently at the international level. The COST Action FA 0604 was proposed to coordinate, focus and strengthen both national and pan-European Triticeae genomics, to address infrastructure disparities and to better understand the mechanisms underlying important traits in order to increase the yield, sustainability and quality improvement under the changeable climatic conditions.

Actions which describe the project – Actions are ranked from 1 to 10