On September 9–11, the BELIS project annual meeting took place at the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops (IFVC) in Novi Sad, Serbia. The meeting gathered project partners to present the progress achieved, to plan further activities, and to reflect on some of the key avenues for improving and innovating in legume breeding. LAMMC was represented at the meeting by Dr. Rita Armonienė, Chief Researcher and Head of the Laboratory of Genetics and Physiology, Institute of Agriculture. The programme also included an open day for the BELIS Network stakeholders, who had the opportunity to hear and discuss the BELIS approaches and advances, and to visit the IFVC legume experimental fields and commercial farm.
European legume breeding is taken to the next level for the competitive seed market and sustainable protein production
Enhancing the competitiveness and sustainability of the European legume breeding activities and output is the goal of the BELIS innovation project, launched in October 2023. The project’s key objectives are to develop cost-effective breeding tools, improve the economic and regulatory environment for legume breeding, and ensure efficient innovation transfer through a collaborative platform for public-private partnerships.
A unified approach to legume breeding
Legumes, both for grain and forage production, play a crucial role in agriculture by providing essential protein for human and animal consumption and offering environmental benefits, mostly related to symbiotic nitrogen fixation. Despite their potential, the cultivation of legumes in Europe has been limited by the lack of high-yielding and resistant varieties, resulting in a high import rate for legume grains and nitrogen fertilisers into Europe. BELIS aims to close this gap by leveraging advanced breeding methodologies and fostering collaboration between research and industry stakeholders.
The EU Horizon Europe programme launched the ambitious project ‘Breeding European Legumes for Increased Sustainability’ in October 2023, which aims to create a firm base for the legume breeding community in research and industry across Europe. With a consortium of 34 partners from 18 countries, including research institutes, plant breeders, seed companies, registration offices, and advisory services, BELIS is ready to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in legume breeding research and variety development.
Overall, the project focuses on seven forage crops (lucerne, red, white and annual clover, sainfoin, birds-foot trefoil, and vetch) and seven cereal crops (pea, faba bean, soybean, white lupin, lentil, chickpea and common bean) representing a major part of the diversity of legume species cultivated in Europe.
Innovative research and breeding techniques to enhance genetic progress
BELIS is at the forefront of integrating cutting-edge technologies into legume breeding for optimising the genetic progress and creating new varieties. At the meeting, important preliminary results were presented and discussed, for example, on KASP (a simplified methodology for genotyping polymorphisms at specific markers) outcomes in chickpea, a set of new protocols for measuring and evaluating diseases, pests and quality traits, or on the use of drone images to determine the phenotype forage of legumes in breeding trials. A multi-species SNP array for legumes is being developed, and it is expected to be available for application by researchers and the breeding industry in the coming years. More advanced protocols and techniques of phenotyping and genotyping are being developed to cover more crops and plant stress contexts (drought, waterlogging or various pests and diseases), as well as quality traits on grain nutritional value or technological components for the processing industry. All of this will help in adapting and improving high-throughput methods and techniques to make germplasm screening, characterisation, and breeding programmes run faster and become more precise.
Improving variety testing and registration
BELIS is also dedicated to providing the best conditions for delivering genetic progress achieved on legumes to farmers. For the registration of varieties to the national catalogues, innovations and ideas are tested to provide farmers with more useful information on the seeds’ value for cultivation and use (= VCU), such as adapting the criteria of official variety testing systems and developing multi-country official tests. In the BELIS meeting, a comparison of VCU protocols in various countries was presented, and a Lucerne VCU trial was showcased as part of a network of 8 locations in Serbia, Italy and France.
It is also expected that the project offers recommendations on the use of varieties. Existing information from registration and post-registration tests will be collated and made available. For example, a modelling approach is used to estimate the forage yield potential of different types of lucerne varieties in Europe under the current and future climates and different management practices. Results will be presented later, as this part of the project is still ongoing.
Organisation and cooperation of legume breeding actors, and the BELIS Network
New ideas to improve the organisation and cooperation models for legume research and breeding are being proposed and analysed through case studies in different countries to identify collaborative ways for different actors to complement research and development efforts and to better achieve variety release to the market and boost the availability of adapted legume seeds for farmers. Interesting preliminary results have been achieved, for example, in the German white lupin breeding sector.
BELIS emphasises the importance of collaboration and knowledge exchange. The project aims to create a network that brings together public and private breeders, researchers, advisory services, registration offices, and the seed, food, and feed industries. This network aims at facilitating business collaborations, technical training, and policy advocacy to support legume breeding activities.
On the second day of the meeting, Serbian actors had the opportunity to meet and discuss the project advancements in person and to visit the trials run by IFVC, while stakeholders from other countries were also able to follow the sessions online.
The sister project ‘Legume Generation’, funded under the same call as BELIS, also presented a key result. Regular exchanges between the projects are organised.
Farmers, researchers, and policymakers are encouraged to join the BELIS Network, receive updates on the progress of the project, and contribute to shaping the future of legume breeding in Europe.
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