Euroseeds and EU research projects: BRESOV

What is the BRESOV project about?

For the past 5 years, Euroseeds has been actively involved in the H2020 BRESOV project which looks into tackling the challenges of climate change and growing world population by exploring the genetic diversity of three of the economically most significant vegetable crops (broccoli, snap bean and tomato) and improving the competitiveness of these three crops in an organic and sustainable environment. The consortium’s overall aim has been to increase the plants’ tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses and adapt the varieties to the specific requirements of organic and low-input production processes.

After 5 years of hard work, BRESOV project is coming to its end this April, and the results of the proect were presented to the broad audience, including scientific community, breeders, students, policy makers and stakeholders, at the international conference on the scientific research for the development of organic agriculture “The Improvement of the Broccoli, Snap Bean and Tomato organic farming by Exploiting their Biodiversity: the results of the H2020 BRESOV project”.

What has the BRESOV project achieved?

More than 2500 accessions of broccoli, snap bean, and tomato have been genotyped and phenotyped providing important information related to the QTLs, genes, and SNPs of interest for the crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, controlling and mitigating their effects, and increasing the organoleptic and nutraceutical traits of the products.?The genes, SSRs and the SNPs are of great interest for the marker assisted selection (MAS) of the three crops speeding up the organic breeding programs.

"The elite breeding lines of broccoli, snap bean, and tomato will be the basis for the next new organic cultivars that will support the achievement of the EU Green Deal target to increase organically managed farmland to 25% by 2030." is convinced the project coordinator Professor Ferdinando Branca (University of Catania).

For the three crops researched within the project, the protocols for producing high amount and quality of organic seeds have been improved, individuating promising data regarding sowing, crop density and organic nutrition. Some microbial consortia and natural compounds that have been evaluated by seed priming and soil drenching reduced the incidence and severity for several diseases. The multi-location trials provided additional indications about the most promising cultivars of broccoli, snap bean and tomato evaluated in several EU countries and beyond.

What has Euroseeds role been in the BRESOV project?

Euroseeds has been providing its expertise in two areas:

• technical/scientific: focusing on conception, organization and analysis of scientific plant trials?within a work package on high quality organic seed production;
• communication/dissemination and exploitation of project results: focusing on raising awareness of the project, diffusing the latest news and activities and working on the exploitaiton strategy of project results.

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View BRESOV results (more to be published):