Prolonged drought due to climate change has a severe impact on agriculture, requiring measures to secure yield stability under water-shortage conditions. This project aims to be a BOOSTER for developing innovative and sustainable strategies to create climate resilient and drought tolerant cereals. Two synergistic strategies will be implemented to achieve this goal. Firstly, a new approach will identify genomic variants in regulatory regions functionally associated with drought tolerance. Novel regulatory elements underlying resilience will inform efficient breeding efforts to create new drought tolerant cereal varieties. Secondly, novel seaweed extracts and microbial biostimulants will be developed as an eco-friendly approach for improving drought resilience. The two strategies will be tested in two cereals with different responsiveness to drought: European maize and Ethiopian teff, a cereal with high genetic similarity to the desiccation tolerant Eragrostis nindensis. BOOSTER will improve drought tolerance in both maize and teff, while simultaneously exploring the potential for transferring species-specific drought responsive features. By exploiting natural genetic variation to achieve drought tolerant genotypes and by developing biostimulants derived from living organisms, BOOSTER will take advantage of the already available natural resources to steer our agriculture towards novel drought tolerant varieties. Importantly, BOOSTER approaches and results are transferable to other crops. A tailored communication/dissemination strategy and a stakeholders’ engagement plan will ensure the expected outcomes and impacts. The project will produce increased maize- and teff-derived biomass resources under harsh drought conditions, will lower irrigation requirement, will strengthen competitiveness of European and African agri-food industry, and will provide concrete examples for improving public awareness about a sustainable use of bio-based technologies.

Process monitoring is a crucial task for bioprocess optimization and will play a decisive role in the digitization of future bio-based production systems. System failure prediction technologies must be an integral part of monitoring schemes; however, these technologies are underdeveloped as far as the bioenergy industry is concerned. The objective of PRODIGIO is to establish a base of knowledge for the development of system failure prediction technologies that increase the performance of microalgae production and anaerobic digestion systems and advance towards more favourable techno-economic, environmental and social performance to achieve more sustainable microalgae biogas. By combining perturbation experiments in bioreactor systems and cutting-edge methods for big data analysis, PRODIGIO will decode the triggers, identify early-warnings, define threshold values, and calculate warning times for critical state transitions in bioreactors. Taking into account processes inefficiencies, we estimate that, along with the implementation of prevention countermeasures, PRODIGIO technology could contribute to increasing resource and energy efficiencies >50% throughout the production chain, which would translate into OPEX savings and GHG emissions reduction. The technological solutions that will derive from the project, such as a catalog of early warning signals for the failure of microalgae production and conversion-to-biogas systems, will be pre-commercial in nature; however, a roadmap will be compiled and updated during the course of the project that will identify priority research lines for further development and future implementation of technology. The results of PRODIGIO will pave the way for moving the entire microalgae biogas production chain efficiently towards its theoretical maximum, enabling the development of a fully integrated and truly sustainable microalgae biogas production industry and contributing to strengthening the EU's leadership in renewable fuel technologies.

CHIC is the Chicory Innovation Consortium. Its objective is 1) to implement New Plant Breeding Techniques (NPBTs) in chicory in order to establish it as a multipurpose crop for the production of health-related products with clear benefits for consumers, and 2) to develop co-innovation pathways with stakeholders for game-changing technologies, such as NPBTs. CHIC will develop four different NPBTs. They will be used to steer bioprocesses in chicory and mobilize its under-explored potential to produce immunomodulatory prebiotics and medicinal terpenes. The conceptually different NPBTs will be assessed with respect to technological potential, risks, regulatory framework and their socio-economic impacts. This will be done in close consultation with a Stakeholder Advisory Group (SAG) composed of relevant stakeholders in industry and society. Ongoing project activities and results will be discussed with stakeholders and communicated to interested public using innovative methods including cultural communication and linking art to science. In this context, CHIC will develop two business cases in different application areas, inulin as healthy food ingredient and terpenes as medicinal lead compounds. This effort requires a highly interdisciplinary approach with expertise from molecular sciences, economy, arts, social sciences & humanities, and legislation. The partnership includes three SMEs and a chicory end-user, and international collaboration is established via a research institute in New Zealand. The SAG plays a crucial role in consultation in all phases and activities of the project. Via this co-innovation approach, we aim to contribute to leadership in responsible research innovation and to promote improved understanding of plant biotechnology. Chicory will be boosted as a robust multipurpose crop, tolerant to adverse environmental conditions from which bioactive compounds can be extracted, contributing to sustainable agriculture and a biobased economy.