The world demographic growth and global climate change are major challenges for human society,hence the need to design new strategies for maintaining high crop yield in unprecedented environmental conditions.The objective of TomGEM is to design new strategies aiming to maintain high yields of fruit and vegetables at harsh temperature conditions, using tomato as a reference fleshy fruit crop.As yield is a complex trait depending on successful completion of different steps of reproductive organ development, including flower differentiation and efficient flower fertilization,TomGEM will use trans-disciplinary approaches to investigate the impact of high temperature on these developmental processes.The core of the project deals with mining and phenotyping a vast range of genetic resources to identify cultivars/genotypes displaying yield stability and to uncover loci/genes controlling flower initiation,pollen fertility and fruit set.Moreover,since high yield and elevated temperatures can be detrimental to quality traits,TomGEM will also tackle the fruit quality issue.The goal is to provide new targets and novel strategies to foster breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield.The main strength of TomGEM resides in the use of unique and unexplored genetic resources available to members of the consortium.It gathers expert academic researchers and private actors committed to implement a multi-actor approach based on demand driven innovation.Tomato producers and breeders are strongly involved from design to implementation of the project and until the dissemination of results.TomGEM will provide new targets and novel strategies to foster the breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield under suboptimal temperature conditions.TomGEM will translate scientific insights into practical strategies for better handling of interactions between genotype,environment and management to offer holistic solutions to the challenge of increasing food quality and productivity.

Tomato is a paradigm of crop domestication: a widely cultivated and consumed vegetable but with reduced genetic diversity and therefore highly vulnerable to emerging diseases and climate change. Fortunately, tomato is rich in genetic resources and information to overcome those difficulties and a coalition of scientists and breeding experts which have generated a large amount of this information have been organized under an effective management structure and a series of objectives to overcome those threats. HARNESSTOM aims to demonstrate that increasing use of Genetic Resources is key for food safety and security and can lead to innovation and benefit all stakeholders. By capitalizing on the large effort done recently in several EU-funded projects to connect phenotypes/genotypes in a large number of accessions from different germplasm banks and academia, HARNESSTOM will first collect, centralize and normalize this wealth of information in a way that is easily searchable and displayed in a user-friendly manner adapted to different type of users. Second, HARNESSTOM will develop four prebreeding programs addressing the major challenges of the field: 1) introducing resistances against major emerging diseases, 2) improving tomato tolerance to climate change, 3) improving quality 4) increasing resilience in traditional European tomato by participatory breeding. And additional goal is to increase speed and efficiency in prebreeding what is needed to be able to respond to the emerging challenges in a timely and effective manner. Joint leadership of both academia and industry in each of the WP and the participation of two NGOs representing different stakeholders guarantees the results of the project will have an impact in industry innovation and also in the society. An efficient management and outreach and communication platform is also in place to make sure the project runs smoothly and the interests of all stakeholders are protected

G2P-SOL is a research alliance bringing together the major European and International repositories of germplasm with public and private institutions active in genomics, phenotyping and breeding in the four major Solanaceous crops: potato, tomato, pepper and eggplant. These four crops constitute 66% of the value of European horticultural production, and over 65,000 accessions are available within the consortium. By harnessing the available global biodiversity, novel genotyping and phenotyping concepts and data analysis tools, the G2P-SOL project will link the genetic code underlying Solanaceae biodiversity with the traits that improve productivity, adaptation and human health. By making this information accessible to end-users, the awareness of the available diversity will be increased and use of this genetic diversity in breeding programs will be stimulated, resulting in diversified production chains. The phenotypes and traits of material held in European and major international collections will be described using common ontology terms developed in this project and this information will be housed in an open source software platform, allowing easy interfacing with existing platforms for germplasm cataloguing. G2P-SOL will develop shared values in science and education in the following areas: 1) Defining and maintaining genetic pools for crop improvement. 2) Phenomic and genomic data: generation, analysis, storage, and linkage with gene banks. 3) Pre-breeding and germplasm enhancement. 4) Training, workshops and public outreach. G2P-SOL will redefine how to manage and organize genetic resources and linked genomic and phenomic information in a manner that will make them accessible to naturalists, geneticists and breeders for conservation, scientific research, and breeding in the post genomic era, in compliance with the objectives of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources and the Nagoya Protocol.