The project deals with the urgent need to provide climate-resilient cultivars addressed to organic vegetable production systems. These new cultivars will benefit organic growers, and the organic seed industry, providing much needed security both under current and future scenarios of climate change. In this project, we will exploit the genetic variation of broccoli, bean and tomato for enhanced productivity, by exploiting up-to-date knowledge of genome structure and function. This work will be enhanced by the active involvement of farmers, advisory services, research institutes, breeding companies and food processors from diverse geographical/ climatic contexts in Europe and Non-EU countries.
The selection of pre-breeding/ breeding lines for the three species will be undertaken in organic vegetable farming systems, utilizing an annual crop rotation scheme. New cultivars will be selected for efficiency when grown under water, temperature, and nitrogen stress, for resistance to some pests and diseases, for desirable product quality traits such as taste, visual appearance, post-harvest performance.
The overall aim of the project is to improve the competitiveness of three of the most economically important vegetable crop families (Brassicaceae, Fabaceae, Solanaceae species) when grown in an organic production system; giving growers confidence that they will achieve a sustainable yield. This will be achieved by exploring these species genetic diversity with advanced genomic and phenomic approaches and applying novel markers and traits discovered in the selection of new breeding material for organic breeding.
We will create a pipeline for crop improvement that will accelerate breeding activities and production of high quality organic seed. The use of Brassicaceae, Fabaceae, Solanaceae landraces (LRs) and crop wild relatives (CWRs) will help to develop new breeding material with a broad genetic base, allowing selection of germplasm that is better suited to growth in limiting or changing agro-climatic conditions (e.g. by enhancing resilience through use of the adaptive traits such as root size and architecture, interaction with the soil microbiome) and therefore improving final quality of the produce and its post-harvest performance.
The project will provide the means for enhancing the use of Brassicaceae, Fabaceae, Solanaceae genetic resources in breeding vegetable types across Europe. In this context, the new genetic markers generated by this work will allow other researchers to map and select novel allelic variants from the assembled genetic resources. Breeders can quickly adapt germplasm into their organic breeding programmes. This includes the markers we develop that are associated with resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and with higher productivity and quality. Therefore pre-breeding lines containing beneficial traits will be utilized for breeding activities of each crop for its better adaptation to organic vegetable farming systems. In the long term, the outputs from this project will allow the development of selected cultivars (open pollinated, hybrids), and the introduction of step-changes in the farming systems and practices adapted to organic agriculture based on selection and breeding of appropriate brassicas, snap bean and tomato germplasm with improved yield stability, stress tolerance and human health benefits.
Specific objectives will include:
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Beneficiaries
Work package leader (WP5), project partner