Climate-resilient sunflower crops can help to reduce the EU dependency on imports of vegetable oils and proteins shifting towards sustainable alternatives, to mitigate the impact of agricultural production on water use and greenhouse gas emissions, to grow resources for pollinators, and to promote biodiversity. HelEx will generate the knowledge and use innovative tools to accelerate the breeding of sunflower varieties adapted to extreme drought and heat stresses, while improving their environmental impact and assessing their socio-economic value of the resulting innovations along the value chains. HelEx will thereby consider two related groups of traits increasingly impacted by climate change, i.e. the eco-systemic service to pollinators and seed quality. For this, HelEx brings together scientists, SMEs, and industries representing an international consortium of experts in sunflower ecology, physiology and genomics; plant biotechnology and breeding; pollinator biology and ecology; environmental impact assessment and feedstock processing; and socioeconomic assessment at different scales. This HelEx multi-disciplinary consortium will explore the genetic and molecular processes involved in tolerance to drought and heat in wild extremophile Helianthus species, and identify favorable wild alleles introgressed into cultivated sunflower, for seed quality and pollinator attractiveness resilience (WP1). These processes will be transfered using classical marker-assisted selection and innovative genome editing approaches (WP2), and the environmental and biodiversity impact of these new climate-smart sunflowers assessed (WP3). HelEx will investigate the socio-economic impact and benefits in relevant value chains for different feedstock (WP4). Our communication strategy (WP5) will engage a variety of societal stakeholders to ensure feedback and enhance project progress and outcomes, and make transparent the broader dimensions of plant biotechnology, biodiversity, and benefit sharing

Crop wild relatives (CWR) are wild plant species genetically related to cultivated crops. Their untapped diversity can enhance resilience to biotic and abiotic stress and the nutritional quality of modern crops. Wheat, sugar beet, and oilseed rape were selected by Pro-wild because of their importance to food security and EU farmers and because some of their wild relatives are endemic to Europe. Moreover, these CWRs constitute a rich and under-exploited resource needed to face challenges linked to climate change and the transition to low-input agriculture. The genetic diversity and vulnerability of these CWRs must be better characterized to optimize their conservation and utilization. The objectives of Pro-Wild are to identify priorities for in-situ conservation of the selected CWR gene pools, to survey and complement CWR genebanks collections, and to increase the use of CWRs in crop improvement. Pro-Wild associates 18 partners from 11 EU and associated countries with expertise in ecology, conservation, genomics, pathology, microbiology, plant breeding, agriculture, and sociology. Pro-Wild will compile and analyse CWR occurrence maps and perform new in-situ collections. It will predict the vulnerability of several CWR species and populations to ongoing climate changes. Ex-situ collections will be complemented with endangered CWRs accessions. Pro-Wild will investigate the resilience of CWR collections for relevant biotic and abiotic stresses. The identification of CWR-derived desired traits and their transfer into elite backgrounds will be done to promote CWR use. Overall, Pro-Wild specific goals will be coordinated with input from breeders, farmers, and consumers. Pro-Wild outcomes will contribute to European Green Deal initiatives through research, education, and training. It will serve the EU biodiversity and the Farm to Fork strategies by preserving, characterizing, and utilising wild species that have unique importance for the resilience of our food systems.