The Grain Legumes Integrated Project
New strategies to improve grain legumes for food and feed
GLIP
Summary:
The European Commission asks Integrated Projects to supply a 'Publishable Summary' of its activities. This is intended to ba an document accessible to non-specialists and complementary to the more detailed reports.
This is the link to a pdf of the GLIP publishable summary.
In addition to this summary document we have generated a discussion document that suggests priorities for future legume research.
General description follows:
Grain Legumes Integrated Project (GLIP) is a large multinational project , co-funded by the European Commission FP6 Framework Programme , striving to develop new strategies to enhance the use of grain legumes crops in food for human consumption and animal feed in Europe and beyond.
Grain legumes such as peas, chickpeas, beans and lupins have a significant role to play in European agriculture because of their value as an important source of vegetable protein for human and animal alike and their beneficial impact on the environment. However, the use of these crops in European farming systems is relatively limited compared with the rest of the world because of problems with nutrition, disease, drought and plant morphology.
The principle objective of the project is to mobilise and integrate the European research effort on grain legumes to address these major agricultural constraints affecting the production of GL crops in Europe. Emphasis will be placed on using state-of-the-art methodologies including genomics and bioinformatics, together with transcriptomics and metabolomics.
GLIP is promoting a truly integrated approach to addressing the problems of growing grain legumes in Europe (and beyond). Four areas of activity are involved:
•
A large programme of pure
and applied agricultural research ranging from quantifying the impact
of grain legumes on the environment and its use in animal feed to studying
the fundamental genetic mechanisms that govern the growth and development
of grain legumes and their response to abiotic and biotic stress.
• The coordination and integration of the European research effort on
Grain Legumes and the dissemination of knowledge from it.
• An important part of the dissemination effort involves the formation
of a technology transfer platform (or GL-TTP)
to facilitate interactions between researchers and end-users active
in grain legumes and to disseminate knowledge and products developed from
the research programme.
• A training fund to sustain grain legumes research
by providing fellowships to individual scientists and to support a programme
of short courses & workshops
A more detailed picture of the GLIP project is presented on the project summary page .
What's
New on the GLIP website
Link
to accessing GLIP genetic and genomic resources
