Rewiring photorespiration using natural and synthetic pathways to sustainably increase crop yield “GAIN4CROPS”

The overarching goal of this project is to develop novel disruptive technologies to overcome one of the main constraints on photosynthetic efficiency, which is photorespiration. This is a process that reduces CO2 assimilation efficiency, thus influencing biomass yield and agricultural productivity.
The project GAIN4CROPS received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Grant Timeline

MAY 2020

Start Date

JUNE 2022

NRGene delivers reference level assemblies

April 2025

End Date

MAY 2020

Start Date

JUNE 2022

NRGene delivers reference level assemblies

April 2025

End Date

Goals & Objectives

The project aims to improve the efficiency of the most common photosynthetic metabolism in plants – the C3 metabolism – by following a stepwise approach. The concepts and strategies developed within GAIN4CROPS will serve as a research and innovation roadmap to attain higher photosynthetic performance in a broad range of C3 crops. Innovative crops can be a useful tool for addressing climate change and pollution, as they can be more resilient and with lower resource consumption. Thus, such crops can lead the way toward more sustainable agriculture.

 

NRGene’s Activity Within the Project

NRGene coordinates the DNA extraction, library preparation and sequencing of multiple sunflower varieties and will use its state-of-the-art, high-quality genome assembly software to generate high accuracy, comprehensive, and contiguous reference level genome assemblies. These high-quality assemblies will enable the different scientific tasks in the project to be executed by other partners, such as genome annotation and comparative genomics tasks.

 

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