Objective
With the world’s population steadily rising and the impacts of climate change intensifying, agriculture stands at a critical turning point. The fruit industry now faces pressing challenges that threaten both its growth and long-term sustainability. These include: i) unpredictable weather, increasing droughts and floods that can affect yield and quality of fruit crops; ii) pest and disease outbreaks, as climate change creates favorable conditions for invasive pests and the emergence of new plant diseases, iii) scarcity of resources, driven by reduced water availability, soil degradation and loss of arable land. These challenges lie at the core of traditional fruit tree breeding programs. The development of characterizable offspring typically requires several years. Although conventional breeding and mutagenesis have substantially contributed to the development of improved varieties, meeting past demands of consumers and growers for yield, quality, and emerging biotic and abiotic stresses due to climate change highlight the need for complementary, faster and more precise strategies. SMARTER-FRUIT aims to go beyond incremental improvements by developing and optimizing a suite of advanced NGT-based tools tailored to fruit tree crops. SMARTER-FRUIT integrates complementary methodologies to accelerate breeding and enhance resilience to combined climate stresses in fruit trees, while broadening genetic diversity to meet the regulatory requirements for NGTs.
The SMARTER-FRUIT project pushes the boundaries of current plant breeding, laying the scientific foundation for the Future Technology of the 'Programmable Orchard' and on-demand genetic resilience for fruit crops.
The long-term goal is to transform fruit trees—slow-growing, highly heterozygous, and recalcitrant—into adaptive systems capable of rapid and precise response to combined climate stresses. The scientific breakthrough lies in synergistically overcoming the historical bottlenecks of woody plant biotechnology.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture horticulture fruit growing
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture agronomy plant breeding
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics heredity
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2025-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
38098 San Michele All'Adige
Italy
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.