Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AGENT (Activated GEnebank NeTwork)
Reporting period: 2021-11-01 to 2023-04-30
The AGENT project will address the above question by establishing an actively cooperating network of European (and international) GB and converting these from passive seed repositories into active bio-digital resources centres. Part of their material will be purified and complemented with dense genotypic information (‘precision collections’, ‘bridging collections’) and by an approach of systematic, coordinated, standardized and sustainable accumulation of phenotype information. The objectives of the project will be exemplified using barley and wheat, two of the most important crops both in Europe and at an international level. Concepts and protocols established for these species can be easily transferred to datasets existing for other crop GenRes collections, thus generating impact for holdings of many crop species far beyond the project boundaries.
Based on AGENT’s achievements, stakeholders will become able in the future to select GenRes on the basis of a new quality of information provided by AGENT GB. First, the composition (level of uniqueness / redundancy) of individual European GenRes collections will be determined using dense accession-specific genotype information. Furthermore, the collaborative accumulation of phenological but also biotic and abiotic stress related phenotype information for the genotyped material of AGENT partner GB is establishing a novel data foundation to perform genomic predictions across the AGENT GB network – in other words: future selection of GenRes will take into consideration the complementary (but also redundant) diversity held by AGENT partner GB. This will be facilitated through new functionalities of the database EURISCO and newly developed associated web-tools, thus allowing to select GenRes specifically for multiple purposes. This will shorten the time to application in pre-breeding, and as such contributing to meet the rising global need for plant-based food, feed and other products.
Activities of the AGENT project are in line with Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations (UN), specifically SDG15 (life on land: ‘halt biodiversity loss’), since dissemination of AGENT results will contribute to increased agrobiodiversity. In the long term, we also impact on SDG1 (‘no poverty’) and SDG2 (‘zero hunger’) as better documented archiving and better-informed selection of GenRes will enable the future breeding of crops more durable under changing climate and environmental conditions. This will support the stability of income to farmers and help sustain sufficient food supplies, especially as concepts proven in AGENT are transferred to a broader network of GenRes collections and stakeholders at the international scale.