The INCREASE project: Intelligent Collections of food-legume genetic resources for European agrofood systems.

Food legumes are crucial for all agriculture-related societal challenges, including climate change mitigation, agrobiodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, food security and human health. The transition to plant-based diets, largely based on food legumes, could present major opportunities for adaptation and mitigation, generating significant co-benefits for human health. The characterization, maintenance and exploitation of food-legume genetic resources, to date largely unexploited, form the core development of both sustainable agriculture and a healthy food system. INCREASE will implement, on chickpea (Cicer arietinum), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), lentil (Lens culinaris) and lupin (Lupinus albus and L. mutabilis), a new approach to conserve, manage and characterize genetic resources. Intelligent Collections, consisting of nested core collections composed of single-seed descent-purified accessions (i.e., inbred lines), will be developed, exploiting germplasm available both from genebanks and on-farm and subjected to different levels of genotypic and phenotypic characterization. Phenotyping and gene discovery activities will meet, via a participatory approach, the needs of various actors, including breeders, scientists, farmers and agri-food and non-food industries, exploiting also the power of massive metabolomics and transcriptomics and of artificial intelligence and smart tools. Moreover, INCREASE will test, with a citizen science experiment, an innovative system of conservation and use of genetic resources based on a decentralized approach for data management and dynamic conservation. By promoting the use of food legumes, improving their quality, adaptation and yield and boosting the competitiveness of the agriculture and food sector, the INCREASE strategy will have a major impact on economy and society and represents a case study of integrative and participatory approaches towards conservation and exploitation of crop genetic resources.

The utility of the 'Arable Weeds and Management in Europe' database: Challenges and opportunities of combining weed survey data at a European scale.

Over the last 30 years, many studies have surveyed weed vegetation on arable land. The 'Arable Weeds and Management in Europe' (AWME) database is a collection of 36 of these surveys and the associated management data. Here, we review the challenges associated with combining disparate datasets and explore some of the opportunities for future research that present themselves thanks to the AWME database. We present three case studies repeating previously published national scale analyses with data from a larger spatial extent. The case studies, originally done in France, Germany and the UK, explore various aspects of weed ecology (community composition, management and environmental effects and within-field distributions) and use a range of statistical techniques (canonical correspondence analysis, redundancy analysis and generalised linear mixed models) to demonstrate the utility and versatility of the AWME database. We demonstrate that (i) the standardisation of abundance data to a common measure, before the analysis of the combined dataset, has little impact on the outcome of the analyses, (ii) the increased extent of environmental or management gradients allows for greater confidence in conclusions and (iii) the main conclusions of analyses done at different spatial scales remain consistent. These case studies demonstrate the utility of a Europe-wide weed survey database, for clarifying or extending results obtained from studies at smaller scales. This Europe-wide data collection offers many more opportunities for analysis that could not be addressed in smaller datasets; including questions about the effects of climate change, macro-ecological and biogeographical issues related to weed diversity as well as the dominance or rarity of specific weeds in Europe.

Promoting the Use of Common Oat Genetic Resources through Diversity Analysis and Core Collection Construction.

The assessment of diversity and population structure and construction of a core collection is beneficial for the efficient use and management of germplasm. A unique collection of common oat landraces, cultivated in the temperate climate of central Europe until the end of the twentieth century, is preserved in the Polish gene bank. It consists of 91 accessions that have never been used in breeding programs. In order to optimise the use of this genetic resource, we aimed to: (1) determine genetic and agro-morphological diversity, (2) identify internal genetic variation of the tested accessions, (3) form a core collection and (4) recognise the accessions useful for breeding programs or re-release for cultivation. The collection was screened using ISSR markers (1520 loci) and eight agro-morphological traits. Uniquely, we performed molecular studies based on 24 individuals of every accession instead of bulk samples. Therefore, assessment of the degree of diversity within each population and the identification of overlapping gene pools were possible. The observed internal diversity (Nei unbiased coefficient) was in the range of 0.17-0.31. Based on combined genetic and agro-morphological data, we established the core collection composed of 21 landraces. Due to valuable compositions of important traits, some accessions were also identified as useful for breeding programs. The population structure and principal coordinate analysis revealed two major clusters. Based on the previous results, the accessions classified within the smaller one were identified as obsolete varieties instead of landraces. Our results show that the oat landraces are, in general, resistant to local races of diseases, well adapted to local conditions and, in some cases, yielding at the level of modern varieties. Therefore, in situ conservation of the landraces in the near future may be satisfactory for both farmers and researchers in terms of the genetic resources preservation.