Agrobiodiversity is a vital subset of biodiversity and is the result of the interaction between the environment, genetic resources and management systems used by culturally diverse people. It is a crucial prerequisite for ecologically and economically sustainable agricultural systems and is an important tool for ecological intensification. The aim of CROPDIVA is to reinforce agrobiodiversity on different levels and along distinct geographic and socio-economic areas. The activities of CROPDIVA are clustered around five connected research work packages and three pillars, each with a set of specific objectives: i) promotion of six key underutilised arable crops: oats, hull-less barley, triticale, buckwheat, faba bean and lupin; ii) creation of value chains for selected underutilised crops ; and iii) study of the socio-economic impact of project results. The concept of CROPDIVA is an innovative challenge driven approach based on the promotion of underutilised crops in sustainable cropping systems and new regional value chains. Project activities will focus on the following major challenges: improved resilience of cropping systems, alignment of the economic and social needs of farmers with ecological goals as well as marketing of new food/non-food products meeting consumer demands. The results gathered in CROPDIVA will not be descriptive, but will be used for innovative solutions along the entire food and non-food chain to enable biodiversity management on all levels, including diversifying the use of genetic resources, crop production systems, new food/non-food products, market opportunities while satisfying producers and investigated consumer requirements.

Plant viruses cause an estimated 50 billion € loss worldwide per year. Viral diseases represent one of the most limiting factors in European crop production having negative effects on the quantity and quality of foodstuffs. The scope of COBRA is to intensify applied and fundamental research on plant/virus interactions in order to diversify targets for resistance gene pyramiding strategies and to match the research outputs with industry and breeding applications. COBRA benefits from multidisciplinary research teams involving genomics, bio-informatics, population genetics, molecular biology, virology and plant breeding. It focuses on three major crops, barley, tomato and stone fruit trees. The originality of COBRA is to test the generic mode of interference of plant viruses, from annual plants to perennials, from dicotyledons to monocotyledons in order to implement complex and durable resistance. COBRA is built on five transdisciplinary workpackages (WPs). The objective of WP1 is to build an exhaustive and comprehensive database of plant-virus interaction networks for the three crops of interest. Such a database facilitates identification of new host susceptibility genes (S-genes) that could serve as resistance genes when mutated. In WP2, the biological relevance of some of the interactors unraveled in WP1 or by COBRA partners will be validated, demonstrating that they are not only plant/virus interacting factors but they are susceptibility factors encoded by bona fide S-genes. The goal of WP3 is to screen for alleles of resistance for the S-genes identified above. Alleles of resistance to viral infection will be searched among mutagenised tomato, barley and peach collections. Germplasm collections of those three species will also be surveyed as well as core collections representative of their diversity in order to implement marker assisted selection and association studies for resistance to crop viruses. Any valuable plant material will be immediately transferred to crop breeding programs. In year 1, COBRA focuses on the search for variants of strong candidate S-genes already validated or patented by the project’s partners. The high throughput platforms set-up for the few above candidates will then serve to screen for variants of candidates validated in WP2 (year 2) before targeting hundreds of candidates highlighted in WP1 (year 3). In the fourth WP, we plan to decipher two independent host pathways that poty and potexviruses are hijacking in order to complete their viral infectious cycles. Extra biological information will be generated in order to optimize in WP3 the search for virus resistant variants. Finally, WP5 is aimed at selecting among the above interactors, host proteins as candidates-of-choice for gene pyramiding. The purpose here is to provide knowledge on the viral factor(s) that determine(s) the breaking of the resistance provided by candidate genes identified in the above WPs and to evaluate the durability of the resistance.