How GEN4OLIVE’s SME funding boosted technology and resilience in the olive sector
Problems related to biodiversity loss and genetic erosion are severely affecting the olive sector, one of the most important cultivars from the cultural and economic point of view in Mediterranean Basin and Europe. Emerging diseases and climate change pose major threats to this sector. To this point, the last dry season has caused the decrease of olive oil production by 57% (Olive Oil Times, Matthew Cortina, Italy 2018). In addition, there are currently more than 1200 olive varieties worldwide, but only 5% are the predominant commercial varieties, which increases the risk of genetic erosion. This tremendous reduction of commercial olive varieties is a result of the continuous selection, mainly based on their productivity, fruit size and oil content. However, future challenges were not considered during this process.
The non-mainstream commercialised genetic resources of olives remain largely unexplored but could hold the key to solve current and future problems related to climate change and emerging disease. Significant gaps still hinder their exploitation, such as poor characterisation of olive varieties, scarce development of pre-breeding activities, both in combination with a lack of collaboration between the Germplasm Banks (GBs) and breeders.
The European project GEN4OLIVE was funded under Horizon 2020 programme to accelerate the mobilization of domestic and wild GenRes of the Mediterranean basin olive cultivar and enhance olive pre-breeding activities through a multi-actor approach.
Coordinated by the University of Córdoba (Spain) in cooperation with fifteen other partners from 7 countries: DEMETER and EFE (Greece), SCI, CTA, BALAM, CAMBRICO, Granada University and Jaén University UJA (Spain), ORI and ANKU (Turkey), CREA and Sapienza University (Italy), FOCOS (Germany), CNRS (France) and INRA (Morocco), the GEN4OLIVE project has boosted the development of a smart interface to leverage the olive GenRes and the participation of breeders and growers through the implementation of two open calls for supporting pre-breeding activities and breeding plans.
GEN4OLIVE developed collective pre-breeding activities aiming to in-depth characterize more than 500 worldwide varieties and 1000 wild and ancient genotypes evaluating four key aspects: adaptability to climate change, resistance to pests and diseases production and quality, and modern planting systems. After integrating all results in the GEN4OLIVE interface, breeders and other end-users had an effective tool for speeding up all kind of breeding programs. The combination of pre-breeding results with modern ICTs enabled the access of end-users to this valuable information.
Voucher scheme to support SMEs
In pursuit of achieving GEN4OLIVE objectives, actors from the most important countries in the olive sector were involved. Interaction between scientific knowledge, Germplasm Banks and stakeholders, such as breeders and nurseries, was considered a key point to improve mobilization of Genetic Resources and to allow olive production sector to address before mentioned challenges. Therefore, GEN4OLIVE allocated a budget of 870.000€ to support mobilization of pre-breeding activities and breeding plans, through two open calls for innovation projects. This was carried out through a voucher scheme. The maximum amount granted per SME did not exceed 60.000€ in total, even in the case of being beneficiary in both calls.
The target audience of GEN4OLIVE calls were SMEs interested in olive breeding activities, who can be defined as end-users of Germplasm Banks resources and of the platform developed by GEN4OLIVE. This included mainly breeders, olive farmers, olive oil/table olives producers and all other kind of SMEs (such as the ICT sector) that might contribute directly or indirectly to the acceleration and improvement of the olive genetic resources.
The first GEN4OLIVE open call offered vouchers for proposals that aimed to deploy olive pre-breeding activities and/or develop innovative technologies that may contribute to accelerate breeding process and make it more effective. It addressed ambitious individual or collaborative projects with duration of 24 months. These projects started from previous research work results (TRL≥6) to conduct pre-breeding activities, by taking advantage of existing olive genetic resources in GBs or out of the GBs, and by applying or adjusting new technics to accelerate this process. Topics were aligned with the five major GEN4OLIVE research areas: (1) climate change effect resilience; (2) pests and diseases resilience; (3) high production varieties; (4) high quality varieties; (5) excellent agronomic performance.
The second open call, addressed to applicants from associated countries, offered vouchers for proposals that aimed to design a genetic breeding plan and implement validation activities to demonstrate the feasibility of it. It was addressed to individual projects of short duration (maximum 12 months). The purpose of this call was to allow breeders to draw up breeding plans, based on the results and tools developed by GEN4OLIVE projects and their own needs.
There main funded activities were:
- 1st Call Pre-breeding Activities: Aimed at identifying desirable traits or genes from materials that cannot be directly used in breeding populations and transferring these traits to an intermediate set of materials for breeders to use in developing new varieties for farmers.
- 1st Call Enabling Technologies Development Activities: Activities consisting of the development of a technological solution aiming at supporting the implementation of pre-breeding activities for olive tree varieties. The technology to be developed will have a minimum Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 6.
- 2nd Call Breeding Plan Design: Aimed at improving and increasing traits such as quality, flavour, yield, tolerance of abiotic and biotic stresses based on the use of olive genetic resources extracted from Germplasm Bank collections.
- 2nd Call Validation Activities: Consists in the implementation of validation activities that can demonstrate the feasibility of the breeding plan to designed.
Framework of GEN4OLIVE project challenges and goals
The latest reports stress the rising problems related to biodiversity loss and genetic erosion, which subsequently cause problems related to agriculture sustainability and food security. These problems have also affected the olive sector, which is one of the most important species in the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. For instance, in Spain, more than 250 varieties are registered, but 4 of them represent 60% of the olive growing surface and one of them, the Picual variety, produces almost half of Spanish olive oil (Barranco & Rallo, 2000) (Muzzalupo, Giuseppe, & Chiappetta, 2014).
Nowadays, the olive sector faces challenging risks, such as dangerous diseases and climate change effects. For example, Xylella disease appeared six years ago and currently there is no cure. Because of the olive trees affected, more than 230.000 hectares of olive plantations had to be cut down (D’Amato, 2015). Also, the effects of climate change are being felt by olive oil producers around the globe. Season 2018 has been very dry in Italy, causing the decrease of olive oil production up to 57% (Cortina, 2019). The solution to this situation comes from a better and more intensive use of genetic resources, boosting collaboration between breeders and Germplasm Banks.
Olive genetic resources are preserved in GBs, wild relatives are still naturally conserved in different Mediterranean Basin areas and in GBs and ancient olive species are dispersed in many Mediterranean countries. Pre-breeding activities are needed to clearly characterize this genetic material in all aspects and integrate all the obtained data in an intelligent online platform to provide breeders with the best tool for conducting all kind of breeding programs to face all present and future challenges.
To do so, GEN4OLIVE project encompassed a wide, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary consortium of 16 partners from 7 different countries, which enabled to leverage olive genetic resources to a higher level closer to breeders and markets. The cooperation among the international GBs of the five most important oleic countries provided the principal genetic material to be explored and exploited. The combination of prebreeding results with modern ICTs systems and technologies (artificial intelligence, machine learning based on big data), provided end users with easy access to the obtained results. Also, the participation and interaction of breeders and growers during the project execution, through two specific open calls for providing financial support, was one of the crucial points of this project to solve the real problems under the open science approach. More than 500 authenticated olive varieties were found among the five GBs, while more than 30 varieties were found repeatedly in each GB, which enabled the comparison studies.
GEN4OLIVE open call results and outcomes
As mentioned before, two open calls were launched with deadline for submission in December 2021 and January 2023, respectively. In total, more than 60 proposals were received, 35 in the first call and 27 in the second one. They were evaluated according to the following criteria: excellence of the project (scientific and technical quality, innovation, and feasibility), the potential impact of the project (economic and market impact, international and social impact) and implementation (work plan, capacities and company teams involved, collaboration with other entities, management of intellectual property). In the end, 25 projects involving 26 SMEs were selected (see Table 4): 8 from the first call (6 collaborative and 2 individual) and 17 from the second call (all individual). The selected projects benefited from direct financial through vouchers worth k€10 to k€100, depending on the type of project.
The first call granted a total of €700,000 accounting for approximately 80.5% of the total budget. Meanwhile, the second call granted a total of €170,000, accounting for approximately 19.5% of the total budget. Comparing both calls, in the first one it was allocated a significantly larger amount of funds than to the second one because of projects typologies: projects under the 1st call were ambitious and long (24 months) while 2nd call projects were short breeding plans (12 months) with low budget.
For more on the participation of SMEs, results and success cases, read the full ebook.
