CREA - Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Italy

The Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA) is an Italian national public research institution. With 47 research stations spread throughout the territory, it is focused on theoretical and applied research, including public plant breeding, for the agri-food and forestry sector. CREA will participate with its Cereal Research Centre (CREA-CER), one of CREA’s biggest research centres, that is going to lead the Cereal and Industrial Crop Research Centre by coordinating seven research stations in Italy. Presently, CREA-CER is devoted to genetic and genomic studies in durum wheat in terms of both species domestication and adaptation to limiting environments as well as in the same species, to agronomic studies in no-tillage and rotations, to the deployment of unconventional genotypes for food and no-food uses. Within CREA public breeding programmes, CREA-CER is leading the one on tetraploid wheats.

Role in the project

CREA will be leader of work package 4, with the task leadership of genetic mapping (Task 4.1), as with the participations to the tasks of genomic selection, evolutionary participatory, and hybrid breeding (Tasks 4.2, 4.3, 4.4). CREA will also have other significant roles in work package 1 as leader of task 1.3 - modelling to extrapolate and integrate data to explore future scenarios and complement field experiments, in work package 2 - field phenotyping of a large panel of durum wheat genotypes (already available at CREA), in work package 3 - field testing of genotype mixtures, and in work package 6 (communication and dissemination). In this last work package, CREA will organize the second of the three SolACE Stakeholders’ Events.

Key persons involved

• Prof. Nicola Pecchioni, Leader work package 4
• Pina Ferragonio
• Antonio Gallo
• Dr. Giovanni Laidò
• Dr. Michele Rinaldi
• Dr. Sergio Saia
• Dr. Pasquale De Vita