GEN4OLIVE Project Funded by the European Commission

Currently, many olive plantations are at risk from rapidly spreading diseases like Xylella fastidiosa, causing significant yield losses. Encouraging farmers to use olive varieties with a broader genetic diversity, especially older olive varieties, is seen as a suitable mitigation strategy.

To enable this, The European Commission has funded under the Horizon 2020 (H2020) program the GEN4OLIVE project in which FOCOS is a project partner. The virtual kick-off meeting took place on October 19.

The official press release can be found below:

LAUNCH OF GEN4OLIVE PROJECT

Mobilization of Olive Genetic Resources through pre-breeding activities to face the future challenges and development of an intelligent interface to ensure a friendly information availability for end users.

On the 19th October (2020), the kick-off meeting of GEN4OLIVE project has been held through a multilateral video conference due to COVID-19 restrictions. GEN4OLIVE consortium is coordinated by the University of Córdoba (Spain).

GEN4OLIVE, an Innovation Action funded by Horizon 2020, aims to leverage olive Genetic Resources (GenRes) by bringing them closer to breeders and farmers. The olive industry is one of the most important in the Mediterranean Basin and European agriculture, with great social and economic impacts. Emerging diseases, such as Xylella, and climate change problems are threatening the industry, while the genetic resources that may have the key to solve them remain largely unexploited.

Currently there are more than 1,200 worldwide olive varieties, but just 5% of them represent near all the harvested area. Olive genetic resources are preserved in
Germplasm Banks, but a shared effort is needed to clearly characterize all aspects of this genetic material and integrate the information to be ready for its use.
GEN4OLIVE project encompasses a wide, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary consortium of 16 partners from 7 different countries, including the International Germplasm Banks of the top five olive growing countries, which will provide the genetic material to be explored and exploited. Additionally, the GEN4OLIVE projectis directly supported by the International Olive Council (IOC) as part of the Advisory Board.

Overall goals of GEN4OLIVE project

The overall goal of GEN4OLIVE is to accelerate the mobilization of olive GenRes and to foster pre-breeding activities by:

1. Developing collective pre-breeding activities aiming to in-depth characterize more than 500 worldwide olive varieties and 1000 wild and ancient genotypes around 4 main topics:
   - Climate change resilience.
   - Pests and diseases resilience varieties.
   - High production and high-quality varieties
   - Adaptation to modern planting systems.
2. Developing a smart and user-friendly interface to make genetic resources much more accessible to the end user.
3. Building two mobile Apps using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to easily detect olive diseases and identify olive varieties.
4. Enhancing breeders and growers’ participation through the implementation of two open calls for supporting SMEs' pre-breeding activities and breeding plans.

Structure of the consortium

Participant organisations

• University of Cordoba (COORDINATOR), Spain
• Hellenic Agricultural Organisation "DIMITRA". Institute of Olive Tree and Subtropical Plants, Greece
• Olive Research Institute. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Izmir, Turkey
• SANTA CRUZ INGENIERIA, Spain
• Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique – Centre Regional de Marrakech, Morocco
• Technological Corporation of Andalusia Foundation, Spain
• Gálvez Productos Agroquímicos, Spain
• Cámbrico Biotech, Spain
• Hellenic Union of Nurseries, Greece
• Council for Agricultural Research, Italy
• FOCOS GbR, Germany
• ANKARA UNIVERSITESI, Turkey
• University of Granada, Spain
• University of Jaen, Spain
• Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
• Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

For more info please contact:
Coordinator: Professor Diego Barranco Navero
Universidad de Córdoba- ETSIAM
Departamento de Agronomía
Campus de Rabanales-Edificio C-4
14071 CORDOBA
gen4olive@uco.es