• H2020
• Societal Challenges
• Climate Action

A €6.9m initiative funded by the European Commission will focus on the cataloguing and characterisation of solanaceous crops (potato, tomato, pepper and eggplant).

The global research alliance will preserve and, where necessary, revive the genetic resources of the crops and is to be co-ordinated by the Agenzia Nazionale Per Le Nuove Tecnologie, L’Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile (ENEA), Italy.

These crops contribute over two thirds (66%) of Europe’s horticultural crop production, with potato being a staple for over 800 million people worldwide. The new H2020 project, named G2P-SOL, aims to utilise seeds from tens of thousands of these solanaceous crops stored in worldwide genebanks.

It is hoped that a better understanding of their genetic diversity will contribute to the sustainability of agriculture. With a complement of 19 full partners and 20 associated partners from four continents, G2P-SOL is funded by the commission with a total budget of €6.9m running from March 2016 to February 2021.

Professor Giovanni Giuliano of ENEA and co-ordinator of G2P-SOL said: “Genetic diversity is most efficiently preserved when the germplasm is well-characterised, widely available and employed in agricultural practice. Thus, scientists, breeders and farmers need to become familiar with the tools used to preserve, catalogue and assess the germplasm, using publicly accessible information on its diversity and associating it with phenotypes and agronomic traits.”

G2P-SOL will generate ‘core collections’ composed of representative accessions for each species, which will be characterised in order to understand the genes stored in the global genebanks. The information will be accessible through an open access platform that will allow the exchange of genetic materials within and outside the project in accordance with the provisions of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing.

It is hoped that G2P-SOL will advance science and education in crop and germplasm improvement, phenomic and genomic data, and in public outreach and knowledge dissemination.