BreedingValue has launched the first of its Open Calls for proposals, a mechanism through which it is seeking to transfer funding and knowledge from the project to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the field of berry breeding.
The project was launched earlier this year and is focused on “developing new breeding strategies for resilient and highly nutritious berries”. The Horizon 2020 project brings together 20 European research partners and breeders, including a number of ENDURE partners, with funding just short of €7 million over the course of four years.
BreedingValue is addressing berry breeding challenges for strawberries, raspberries and blueberries “brought on by climate change, environmental preservation and the need for new cultivation systems as well as high-quality produce.
“The project will identify and introduce superior germplasm for European berry breeding programmes, as a valuable source to develop cultivars ensuring high yield combined with high sensorial quality by sustainable production methods under different climatic environments.”
The project has timetabled four Open Calls over the course of the project, which will fund 14 projects. Based on the idea of co-creation, the calls will offer the opportunity to test, further optimise and validate the tools developed in the project.
Calls one, two and three are designed to transfer new genotyping tools (standard material transfer agreement, marker-assisted selection, genome-wide association study and genomic selection) to breeders, while the fourth is designed to train experts in sensorial quality assessments, quality control tools and consumer science studies.
Calls two and three are currently open. The objective of call two is “to employ state-of-the-art methodology on breeders’ material and implement genomic selection to the breeders. This can help breeders to do selection in the early stages of their breeding programme, accelerating the generation cycles by identifying superior parents, and increasing the likelihood of identifying good candidates for advanced trialling.” Two projects will be funded with €20,000 each, with the call coordinated by the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO).
The objective of call three is “to offer breeders an opportunity to screen and select their genotypes of interest against a suite of markers, which can help breeders to better select parental material depending on the trait of interest. Genome wide association studies (GWAS) delves further into the genetic variants within screened markers across different individuals to determine if any of these variants are associated with a particular trait or disease such as yellow rust susceptibility.” Again, two projects will be funded with €20,000 each. It is being coordinated by the UK’s James Hutton Institute.
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