Two young researchers from Center of Plant Systems Biology and Biotechnology – Manuela Stoyanova and Alexander Angelov – attend the first Annual Consortium Meeting within the BELIS Project.
The one-week event is taking place in Ghent, Belgium, gathering researchers from the 18 countries in the project’s Consortium – Lithuania, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Belgium.
As Europe is still highly dependent on plant protein imports, the BELIS Project aims at developing tools and methodologies for optimizing the legume cultivation with cost-effective breeding programmes . The project will focus on seven forage crops and seven grain crops which will be studied by the researchers in the consortium in terms of nutritional qualities, yield, stress resistance, etc.
Each year, CPSBB will cultivate and collect plant material for sequencing and identification of the genetic markers, associated with the studied plant characteristics. Meetings with farmers, breeders and seed producers will be organized in order to identify the main difficulties that exist along the chain from production to the final consumer.
During the meeting, CPSBB’s representatives were actively involved in discussions on results obtained by the different partners and on planning the upcoming work. During the first year of the project, CPSBB conducted a field trial with more than 150 pea varieties, accessing various phenotypic characteristics. Plant material was collected in order to be sent for nutrient analysis by a partner institution in Germany.
Additionally, case study interviews and workshops with value chain actors from Bulgaria’s pea breeding industry will be organized to provide insight into the current state of pea breeding in the country and identify existing challenges. This knowledge will be used to create a strategy for addressing and solving these issues, with the aim of improving the efficiency of the existing pea breeding policies and business models.
