Food & Feed: crop yields and nutrition security in the context of climate change. 6 th Call for Proposals (2012)

Transcription

1 Food & Feed: crop yields and nutrition security in the context of climate change 6 th Call for Proposals (2012) implemented by a transnational initiative representing funding partners from France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. The call is based on the research program Transnational Plant Alliance for Novel Technologies - towards implementing the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (PLANT- KBBE) in Europe" and beyond. 1

2 1. Background So far, the French / German / Spanish cooperation in plant genomics, plant biotechnology and molecular breeding has successfully executed five consecutive calls for cooperative research projects - published under the titles: Functional and comparative genomics approaches for the investigation and use of natural diversity (2003), Trilateral partnership and beyond: the future for European public/private partnerships in plant genomics (2006), and Scientific and Technological Cooperation in Plant Genome Research as basis of the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (2008, 2009 & 2010). For the most recent calls in 2009 and 2010 the trilateral initiative was extended to include a fourth national funding partner from Portugal, the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), and in 2010 a fifth regional funding partner from Canada, Genome Prairie (GP), participated in the call. As a result of all these consecutive activities, a total of 54 transnational research projects have been awarded so far, with grants corresponding a public budget of about 68 M. Originally launched to fund consortia composed of purely academic partners (2003), the trilateral initiative entered a new phase of sustainable groundwork after the adoption of a common strategy, which defined the future development of the cooperation with regard to (i) applying research results to industrial practice, (ii) strengthening the competitiveness of the businesses involved and (iii) reinforcing the cooperation between public research and industry. The announcement in hand represents the sixth joint call for research projects within the new framework of the transnational cooperation initiative between France, Germany, Portugal and Spain. The PLANT-KBBE funding partners here issue a transnational call for collaborative proposals in plant genomics, plant biotechnology and molecular breeding mutually conducted by teams from the partner countries. The current call focuses on Food & Feed: crop yields and nutrition security in the context of climate change. Proposed consortia are expected to enable an optimal critical mass of researchers in preferably interdisciplinary high quality projects to strengthen and consolidate the PLANT-KBBE programme. In principle, consortia are expected to consist of participants from at least three partner countries and to include researchers from public institution(s) and private industrial company(ies). Consortia that involve PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 2 / 13

3 research groups from only two partner countries are also eligible when two private companies from two different PLANT-KBBE partner countries are involved in the research. Research proposals will preferably be industry-driven with clear applicationoriented objectives. 2. Motivation In the future, our agricultural system must become more sustainable in order to meet a globally growing demand for food and feed. Given the significant advances in plant sciences and biotechnology, this goal will be best achieved by a knowledge-based agricultural system. It is also generally accepted that our long term and quite ambitious goals cannot be realized without a sustainable plant research structure in the EU and beyond. Bearing these challenges in mind and relying on the abovementioned successful collaborative experiences, France, Germany, Portugal and Spain have been encouraged to further develop their mutual interests through the establishment of a joint research programme to support the Transnational Plant Alliance for Novel Technologies - toward implementing the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (PLANT- KBBE) in Europe" and beyond. The common interest in deepening the cooperation in research and development is inspired by our shared understanding that we need to build a KBBE that will enable our economies and societies to meet the major challenges facing us in the 21st century. The PLANT-KBBE programme is progressing in the context of the development of a competitive plant production in sustainable conditions. It aims to continue efforts to understand the genetic components and other factors influencing yields, such as environmental conditions (e.g. increasing droughts). Damage caused by pathogens also limits plant productivity and the evolution of plants pathogens across environments is also influenced by climatic changes. All these issues are usually not simply limited to small focal regions but are rather of cross-national relevance. Therefore, scientific and technological cooperation is essential to find global solutions to ensure safe and healthy food supply and to satisfy our societies future demands. The bio-economy based on the use of renewable biological resources is a growing part of our economies that requires significant R&D investments as well as programme accompanying measures. At the same time we will still need conventional food and feed, which will be produced by agricultural systems driven by the key principle of sustainability under the uncertainties of increasing demand, decreasing hand labor, advanced mechanization, higher cost of raw materials, global (climate) change(s), etc. PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 3 / 13

4 3. Purpose of the call Within the framework of the PLANT-KBBE programme, this call will fund transnational, collaborative, application-oriented projects with a high degree of scientific and technical innovation. This call for proposals intends to attract integrative projects that (i) share resources and technologies, (ii) rule out redundancies but provide synergies, (iii) represent as many links as possible of the respective value-added chain and (iv) provide significant contributions to the solution of complex questions of common interest to the four countries. Such projects are expected to strengthen industry's innovative capacity and facilitate its access to future markets. As a basic prerequisite for ensuring the success of this funding strategy, cooperation between industry and science is highly encouraged to accelerate the application of new findings and to translate research results more quickly into products, services and processes. 4. Research topics This new PLANT-KBBE call for proposals has been developed to promote competitive, novel plant production systems and agriculture in sustainable conditions. The objectives are to develop i) transnational cooperation in application-oriented plant genome research, ii) novel approaches for the improvement of crop plants and algae, and iii) their use in agricultural and industrial innovations. Focal points of PLANT-KBBE are the application of research results in industrial practice, the strengthening of the competitiveness of the involved businesses, and the reinforcement of the cooperation between public research and industry. It aims to address such major factors influencing plant productivity as genetic components and (changing) environmental conditions, as well as their interactions, in the area of food and feed production while promoting environmentally friendly production systems. For further increase of yield and yield stability we must improve plant performance under changing environmental conditions such as increasing droughts and salinity, temperature and light quality changes, flooding, etc. Another major factor limiting plant productivity is damages caused by pathogens, and the migration and adaptation of plant pathogens in changing environments. The programme aims to address these concerns by promoting studies of the pathosystems responsible for plant damage in order to find new methods of diagnosing and treating diseases. All these issues are not simply regional or supraregional: they cut across national boundaries. Therefore, the scientific and technological cooperation supported by PLANT-KBBE has the ambition to find global PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 4 / 13

5 solutions to ensure sustainable supply of high quality food in the future. To achieve these goals, the programme targets projects that are driven by industry s needs and that are based on the following general research themes: 4.1 Yield stability Increasing productivity while developing sustainable agriculture is a continuous concern. Yield increases have levelled off considerably over the past 10 to 20 years. The programme aims to support efforts to identify the genetic components and other factors influencing yield. This knowledge will be useful in increasing yield in a constantly evolving context (changing environment and cultural approaches with reduced inputs, such as water, fertilizers, and pesticides). Projects will apply to crops and algae for food and feed production. Research will focus on securing crop yields in European agriculture and maintaining world-wide competitiveness, with a particular emphasis on genome-wide approaches to crop breeding, reducing inputs, fostering adaptation to climate change, and increasing water use efficiency. Cultivars with improved yield stability and high quality are necessary to maintain the leading position of European agriculture. Breeding towards improved yield stability is hampered by its quantitative genetic basis and the complexity of the genetic networks underpinning plant development and stress tolerance. Non-limiting examples of projects include: (i) genome-wide approaches in crop breeding; (ii) genotyping and phenotyping to accelerate the development of linkage maps and facilitate the development of tools for marker assisted breeding and selection; (iii) nutrient (N, P, K) use efficiency to minimise inputs. 4.2 Plant health Damages caused by pathogens are a major limiting factor in plant productivity and profitability. Thus, the objective of this section is to predict and prevent epidemic diseases affecting major crops and in a horticultural sense - fruit tree species throughout Europe. New tools are expected to identify targets and strategies against pathogens, which in turn could be used to design novel approaches to plant protection (early diagnostics, disease monitoring). Genetic diversity can be exploited to identify possible sources of disease tolerance in plants in order to pursue novel approaches to improve disease tolerance (including marker assisted selection) and to understand the evolution patterns of pathogens (to better model/predict disease developments). Projects will take benefit from multidisciplinary research teams involving genomics, landscape genomics, population genetics, molecular biology, ecology, systematics, and mathematics (for modelling, geography). Genomics projects in bacteria, fungi, virus, PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 5 / 13

6 and insects are eligible provided the study is incorporated in a context of controlling plant diseases. Examples of projects include: (i) genome-wide approaches to the identification of genes involved in pathogenicity; (ii) pathogen molecular diagnostics; (iii) identification of plant genes involved in disease tolerance and defence mechanisms, exploitation of natural diversity; (iv) innovative ways to improve tolerance of agrosystems to diseases (mixed varieties). 4.3 Adaptation to pressures from the environment, phenotypic plasticity Much of the European territory may be faced with recurrent droughts. Water scarcity is having significant impacts on the main sectors of the economy and on natural resources. These impacts are expected to be increased by climate changes. Agriculture is a major consumer of water. This call section aims to improve water use efficiency in plants through breeding strategies, in order to secure yield as well as other features under drought conditions, and to develop methods to ensure a balance between growth and fluctuating environmental conditions. Special emphasis is given to phenotypic plasticity, the ability of an organism to change its physiology and phenotype in response to changes in the environment. Understanding plastic responses is crucial for predicting and managing the effects of climate change on native species and crop plants. An improved understanding of the molecular basis of environmentally induced changes in plant traits, and novel developments such as stress responses modulated by epigenetics, hold promise for enabling us to understand the evolution of plasticity and to predict how plasticity will influence the responses of native plants and agricultural systems to climate change. Non-limiting examples of topics that may be addressed by proposals are: (i) discovery of genetic and epigenetic variability associated to adaptation to water deficit and to enhanced water use efficiency; (ii) molecular and physiological mechanisms of plant adaptation to fluctuating climatic conditions (vernalization, cold tolerance, heat stress); (iii) discovery of genes, gene interactions, and the molecular and metabolic variations underlying adaptive traits to climate change; (iv) transgenerational epigenetic marks in response to environmental stress; (v) QTL and linkage disequilibrium mapping to identify natural variants in plasticity genes; (vi) characterizing patterns of plasticity at the scale of the genome using high-throughput sequencing, and functional genomics approaches; and (vii) utilisation of genetic and genomic resources to identify allelic variations that affect the plant phenotype (allele mining, comparative genomics). PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 6 / 13

7 5. Requirements for collaborative proposals, eligibility of applicants Collaborative research proposals may be submitted by researchers working in universities (or other higher education institutions), in non-university public research institutions, and in commercial companies, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises. Applicants must be based for their research in a country represented by one of the funding partners. The eligibility of the aforementioned institutions, together with details of eligible costs (personnel, consumables, travel expenses, equipment investments, etc.), and the possible maximum amount that an applicant can request in a proposal is subject to the administrative requirements of individual funding organizations and may therefore vary. National annexes, which contain the specific national regulations, are published together with this common call text, and applicants are strongly advised to refer and adhere to their own specific national regulations and scientific remits as detailed in the national annexes (available at Only true transnational projects submitted by private-public partnerships will be funded. Each proposal must involve research groups from at least three PLANT-KBBE partner countries. Consortia that involve research groups from only two partner countries are also eligible when two private companies from two different PLANT-KBBE partner countries are involved in research. The total number of participants should be appropriate for the aims of the research project and reasonably balanced in terms of national participation as well as exploitation of the results. All partners of a collaborative project should significantly contribute to the overall critical mass of the consortium in order to achieve ambitious scientific as well as application-oriented goals and to gain a clearly noticeable added value from working together. The research carried out must involve novel, ambitious and original ideas in plant genomics, molecular breeding or biotechnology. Proposals must have well-identified collaboration vectors (e.g. post-docs, samples circulating among partners) clearly demonstrating the added value of transnational collaboration. Projects running in parallel with little interaction are not acceptable. As a general rule, research proposals are expected to focus on crops of agricultural and/or industrial interest. Some work on model species might be exceptionally acceptable when its usefulness within a clear crop-based project is demonstrated. A project coordinator who represents the consortium externally will be responsible for its internal management. PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 7 / 13

8 Research proposals may include applicants from countries not represented by any of the partner countries, provided that they bring their own funds and demonstrate true added value to the partnership. In the proposal the additional partners must state clearly if the funds they need are already secured or how they plan to ensure that they have their own funding in place by the start of the project. 6. Governance and operational management of call Three bodies are established for the governance and practical implementation of the call: The Governing Board (GB) is composed of representatives from each national funding organization participating in the call, and it is in charge of the policy coordination between the funding partners. In addition, the GB supervises the whole procedure of the call and makes - on the basis of the Scientific Advisory Board s funding recommendation and the respective available national budgets - the ultimate decision on the proposals to be funded by the national funding bodies. The GB will also decide on accompanying joint actions to monitor the funded projects throughout their whole duration, thus allowing the evaluation of the call s impact. The Call Secretariat (CS) is the centre for the call s management. The CS will deal with all the information that flows to and from the applicants (reception of proposals, sending of decisions), the Scientific Advisory Board, the reviewers (contacting the referees, sending the proposals, collecting the evaluation reports) and the representatives of the funding organizations. The Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) is a panel of international experts from science and industry that will be responsible for the scientific and technical aspects of the evaluation procedure. The evaluation process is based on a comprehensive international peer review and culminates in the funding recommendations of the SAB. 7. Submission of proposals Each proposal is submitted by its project coordinator on behalf of all the applicants. Full proposals are to be submitted to the CS in the Project Management Agency Jülich (PtJ, PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 8 / 13

9 Germany) by October 15 th, 2012 (midnight) by means of the application system available at The proposal must be written in English (Arial type 10 pt.) and include: a) Summary of the project: goal(s), work plan and expected results (max. 1 page). b) Aims (max. 1 page). c) Background and state-of-the-art (max. 2 pages). d) Work plan (including involvement of participants in different work packages with names and person-months for each partner; max. 6 pages, plus lists of milestones and deliverables). e) Added value of the proposed international collaboration (max. ½ page). f) Exploitation plan: Prospects regarding application in industry, market potential, position with regard to IPR both within and outside the consortium (e.g. barriers to sharing materials or results) (max. 2 pages). g) Description of ongoing projects of each participant related to the present topic, indicating funding sources and amounts, and possible synergies with this proposal (max. ½ page per participant). h) Brief CVs of the project leaders, including lists of up to five recent publications (max. 1 page each). i) For private companies: short description of the company, own contribution to the project (max. 1 page per company). j) Financial plan (as a summary table). The proposal may also include: k) Description of any significant facilities and large equipment available to the consortium (max. ½ page). l) Description of any training/exchange activities foreseen within the project (max. ½ page). m) List of scientists not recommended as evaluators for known or suspected conflict of interest. The proposals should not exceed the limits given above. No other documents will be considered. However, the act of submission might include additional documents specifically requested by and to be sent to the corresponding national funding PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 9 / 13

10 organization. For further information the applicant is referred to the respective national annexes. The duration of projects is limited to three years. 8. Evaluation and selection of proposals i) Formal check. The CS will assess proposals to ensure that they meet the necessary formal criteria (date of submission; number of participating countries; inclusion of all necessary information in English). In parallel, the respective national funding organizations will perform a formal check of compliance with the respective national regulations (eligible type of institutions and complementary enforced information). Proposals not meeting the formal criteria will be rejected. Proposals passing both checks will be forwarded to the SAB. ii) Peer review. The SAB will select suitable experts from the international scientific community as well as independent industry experts who are available and prepared to evaluate the proposals. External reviewers will carry out a scientific and technical evaluation according to the following specific evaluation criteria: Relevance of the proposal to the call s thematic focus. Scientific excellence Scientific quality, originality/innovative character of the research (sound concept and quality of objectives, progress beyond the state of the art), quality and effectiveness of the methodology, international competitiveness of the proposal, audacity and potential for research breakthrough. Transnational added value Potential of the expected results for future industrial applications (economic innovation potential, market potential and competitiveness, quality of exploitation plan and management of the intellectual property rights), cohesion of proposed research (necessity of contributions from all the co-applicants), and quality of the cooperation with the industrial partner(s). Quality and efficiency of the implementation and management - Appropriateness of the management structure and procedures, quality and relevant experience of the individual participants (applicants scientific track record), relevant collective experience with respect to the objectives, complementarity of the co-applicants. PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 10 / 13

11 iii) Final selection. On the basis of the evaluation reports from the external referees, and on the basis of their personal assessment, the SAB members will prepare written reports summarizing each of the assigned proposals. The SAB members will then be invited to participate in a common evaluation meeting to discuss all proposals and provide a final ranking list of proposals recommended for funding. The GB will then determine the total number of projects recommended for funding, conforming closely to the SAB s ranking and taking into consideration each funding organization s available budget. Projects that are selected for funding will receive their grants directly from the responsible national funding bodies. Within a consortium funding to the individual research groups will be given as well as administered according to the terms and conditions of the responsible national funding bodies taking into account all other applicable national regulations and legal frameworks. In order to provide for adequate protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) and dissemination of research results arising from the collaborative research projects, each consortium is required to sign a Consortium Agreement (CA) within three months of the project s start date. The CA will clarify the responsibilities of all partners and should include arrangements for handling IPR arising from the collaborative work. The CA, together with any other information required by national regulations, must be made available on request to the national funding agencies. In order to facilitate the preparation of the CA, the funding partners intend to offer a jointly prepared and agreed on model CA that includes basic IPR conditions. Accordingly, this model contract will be available at at a later time point and project coordinators will be made aware of the publication of this model form by the CS. Its use is highly recommended to all consortia. The anticipated start of the projects is spring/early summer Contact persons The contact point for the project coordinator is in the first phase the CS in Germany (Pt- Jülich, PtJ). The project coordinator will be the contact point for the CS during the application procedure, so s/he is obliged to forward all relevant information to the other affected participants. In a second phase starting with the peer review process the CS will be taken over by France (ANR). Each country has a national contact person who can provide information about the specific national requirements: PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 11 / 13

12 FRANCE Dr Nathalie Pavy Agence Nationale de la Recherche 212 rue de Bercy Paris plantkbbe@agencerecherche.fr GERMANY Dr Rainer Büschges Projektträger Jülich (PtJ) Geschäftsbereich Biologie 6 Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH D Jülich r.bueschges@fz-juelich.de PORTUGAL Dr Catarina Resende Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia Av. D. Carlos I, 126, Lisboa catarina.resende@fct.pt SPAIN Dr Bibian García Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Dirección General Investigación Científica y Técnica Subdirección General de Proyectos Internacionales Albacete, 5 5ª planta b.garcia@mineco.es 10. Reporting requirements The coordinators of all funded projects are requested to submit mid-term and final scientific project reports to the CS together with summary reports from each participant (everything in English). In accordance with specific national regulations, each PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 12 / 13

13 participant must also submit periodical financial and scientific reports and a final report to his/her national funding agency. The funding partners may jointly organize two meetings, one for the mid-term and one for the final review of the funded projects. These meetings will: (i) assess the projects progress in comparison to their initial objectives; (ii) strengthen the community through a networking of scientists; and (iii) get feedback from the research teams about possible future improvements to the programme. By submitting a proposal, all applicants acknowledge the obligation of at least one representative of each consortium to attend these review meetings. The researchers involved in funded projects will not claim any additional financial contribution from the funding partners to attend the review meetings, although it will be possible for them to apply for these expenses with the application. PLANT-KBBE 2012: Call text 13 / 13