AGENT aimed to create a sustainable and systematic approach for building a genomic and phenomic diversity atlas for genetic resources (GenRes), using barley and wheat as examples. The project established an interactive network of gene banks (GBs) to promote long-term use of conserved GenRes beyond the project’s duration.
AGENT demonstrated how improved collaboration between conservation, characterization, and use can enhance the efficiency and services of European GBs—an objective long pursued by the GenRes community. However, lasting impact depends on continued and increased national funding for GenRes collections.
A key goal of AGENT was to support climate-resilient crop production by giving breeders better tools to access GenRes information. Using dense genotype data, the project assessed the uniqueness and redundancy of European wheat and barley collections, offering a blueprint for scaling this work to all accessions.
For the first time, AGENT GB partners jointly curated and digitized historical characterization and evaluation (C&E) data, and collected new phenotypic data on stress tolerance traits. This enabled genomic predictions across collections, allowing future GenRes selection to be more targeted and efficient.
New functionalities in EURISCO and associated web tools will facilitate multi-purpose selection of GenRes, accelerating pre-breeding and supporting global food, feed, and product needs.
AGENT aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals—especially SDG15 (biodiversity), SDG1 (no poverty), and SDG2 (zero hunger)—by enhancing agrobiodiversity and enabling climate-resilient crop development, thus supporting food security and farmer livelihoods globally.
