Objective
The aim of this concerted action is to introduce and to control asexual reproduction through seeds (apomixis) in apomictic systems and sexual crop plants. The use of apomixis in the agriculture of the 21st century can then revolutionize current breeding strategies. This will have far-reaching potential in crop improvement, not only regarding the sustained agricultural production, but also the quality of the products. Breeding and production will generate a dramatic increase in new varieties and traits per time unit, allowing development of new genotypes better adapted to the different climatic regions of the EU. Using apomixis it will be possible to fix heterosis in a completely new way. Consequently, this will have a major impact on food production. Apomixis will lower seed production costs for the industry and seed costs for the farmers. The process of commercial cultivar production will be simplified. It is thought, that the benefits of apomixis to agriculture will be in the range of billions of ECUs on a worldwide scale.
The understanding and transfer of the complex asexual modes of reproduction from apomictic species and model plants to sexual crop plants can only be achieved by concerted actions via international cooperation and common research efforts. Apomixis research is starting to be a key topic in the US, Canada, Australia, international research institutes like IRRl, CYMMIT, CIAT and others.
It is of utmost importance now to establish a European counterpart to compete with those research activities and to generate new plant variety rights and patents within European plant breeding institutions and seed producing companies.
Therefore, the general aim of this concerted action is the establishment of a european network including many research labs, both academic (10 partners) and industrial (6 partners), which are already engaged in apomixis research or have just started to work in this field. It is planned to develop and use new and optimized breeding strategies, combined with novel genetic, molecular and cytological methods to understand the genetic regulation of the various apomictic processes in apomictic species.
Subsequently, this knowledge will then be used to transfer apomixis from natural apomictic grasses and other genetic model systems to important crop plants that normally reproduce sexually. To exploit asexual reproduction, this knowledge will be further used to control and manipulate apomixis, because proper breeding can only be achieved through sexual crossings.
The research on apomixis will be carried out in four different activities with close collaboration and interconnection with each other. Each activity consists of different crop species and model plants. Many major crop plants that are of agronomic importance in the EU are included in this proposal. Activity 1 deals with apomixis research on forage grasses, activity 2 with the isolation and characterization of apomixis mutants in plant species that normally reproduce sexually and activity 3 with the research on ovule development, parthenogenesis and fertilization. The results of these activities will then be combined in activity 4 to transfer and to control apomixis in sexual crop plants.
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 industrial crops fodder
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture agronomy plant breeding
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Coordinator
22609 HAMBURG
Germany
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