Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria – Centro di Ricerca Cerealicoltura e Colture Industriali
— CREA-CI —
CREA, Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria, Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, is a National Research Organization which operates under supervision of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry (Ministero delle Politiche Agricole, Alimentari e Forestali, MiPAAF) with general scientific competence within the fields of agriculture, agroindustry, economics, food, fishery and forestry. CREA is the leading Italian research organization dedicated to agri-food supply chains, and its expert scientific coverage also reaches agro-industrial and nutritional sectors, up to the socio-economic field.
CREA-CI, Centro di Ricerca Cerealicoltura e Colture Industriali, Research Centre for Cereal and Industrial Crops, one of the 12 research centers of CREA, includes seven territorial sites: Foggia (Puglia) the headquarter, Bergamo (Lombardia), Bologna (Emilia Romagna), Caserta (Campania), Acireale (Sicilia), and Vercelli (Piemonte). CREA-CI mission, through a multidisciplinary approach (genetics, agronomy, physiology, chemistry, biochemistry, pathology) also by means of “omics science”, is focused on cereals’ and industrial crops’ supply- chains, with applications in human nutrition, animal feeding and no-food; the mission of CREA-CI comprises also preservation, characterization and management of biodiversity.
The research activities are focused at: understanding, taking advantages of the opportunities from the new sciences (genomics, metabolomics, Big data), the mechanisms underlying crops production; transforming the scientific knowledge in innovative tools for breeding programs and sustainable productions in cereals and industrial systems and chains; transferring research outcomes and technologies (third mission activities) to the stakeholders, improving the competitivity of the agro-industrial chain. CREA-CI maintains and characterizes a big germplasm collection, spanning from cereals (tetraploid and hexaploid wheat, maize, rice, sorghum, oat), to industrial crops, such as potato, hemp, bean, sunflower, linen, milk thistle, protein pea, tobacco, industrial tomato, sugar beet, rape, rocket, brassica juncea.
Role within AGENT
CREA-CI will be part of the network of European and international genebanks, core of the AGENT project, by providing a set of 1000 common wheat accessions, and will take part to all the steps of genotyping and phenotyping. CREA-CI will lead task 4.1 - Using genome wide association studies (GWAS) to label accessions for major effect loci: it will run GWAS on all GB collections and will assign, to each accession and for each QTL, a haplotype score usable as a filtering option in the tools that will be developed within the project to support germplasm selections by future users. CREA-CI will take part of the training and capacity building activities by hosting datathons during different phases of the project.
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